Add Plugins To Your VirtualBox Bukkit Minecraft Server

Now that I have my Minecraft craftbukkit server running in an Ubuntu VirtualBox Virtual Machine I’m going to install some basic plugins to make the Minecraft player-experience more user-friendly.

The plugins that I’m going to install are xAuth to ensure the security of each Minecraft player’s identity and Grief Prevention to allow my player’s to create their own secure homes in the server. While I’m at it I’ll add the Essentials plugin.

I’ve setup my server to have a static IP Address on my network so it’s a simple process to connect to the server through ssh using the username, password and ipaddress of the server from a Mac or Linux computer. If you’re using Windows, you’ll need to use an ssh client like Putty to connect to your minecraft server through ssh.

Once again, I’ve put all the commands in bold

ssh -l username minecraft.servers.ip.address

Where the username is the name you created when setting up Ubuntu and the minecraft.servers.ip.address is the ip address of the server. You can get the IP address of your server by doing an ifconfig at the servers console and noting the address of the eht0 interface. You can also connect by using the hostname in lieu of the IP address, (provided your DNS is working properly).

In my case the connection would look like this:

ssh -l minecraft 10.0.0.20

or this:

ssh -l minecraft mcserver

And I’ll be prompted for the password of the “minecraft” user:

After loggin in I am at my “minecraft” user’s home directory:

minecraft@mcserver:~$

If your minecraft/bukkit server is running you’ll need to connect to the screen session and then stop the server:

minecraft@mcserver:~$ screen -r bukkitserver
>stop<enter>

Now go into the game-server directory:

cd bukkitserver
minecraft@mcserver:~/bukkitserver$

And then go into the plugins directory:

cd plugins
minecraft@mcserver:~/bukkitserver/plugins$

This is where we are going to download the plugin JAR files.

First I’m going to grab the xAuth plugin:

wget http://dev.bukkit.org/media/files/651/890/xAuth-2.0.26-bin.zip

Now extract the plugin:

unzip xAuth-2.0.26-bin.zip

Now download the Grief prevention plugin:

wget http://dev.bukkit.org/media/files/691/599/GriefPrevention.jar

That one came down as a jar, so we can go ahead and download the Essentials plugin:

wget http://dev.bukkit.org/media/files/671/664/Essentials.zip

And now extract the plugin(s):

unzip Essentials.zip

The plugins are downloaded and will load the next time the server is started so let’s go ahead and go back to the server directory:

cd ~/bukkitserver

minecraft@mcserver:~/bukkitserver$

From here we can start the server with the ./run.sh command.

minecraft@mcserver:~/bukkitserver$ ./run.sh

Our server will create the necessary configuration files for all of the newly installed plugins as it boots up. Now that we are in the screen session with the minecraft/bukkit server running, we can just just type stop and hit enter to shutdown our bukkit server and then edit our configuration files to setup the plugins to suit our needs.

Once you have gone in and read and edited all the configuration files, you can just go back and restart your minecraft/bukkit server by running the ./run.sh command from your buukkitserver directory.

I’ve created a VirtualBox Appliance from this server which is ready-to-run by simply importing the appliance into VirtualBox.  You can download this Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Minecraft Bukkit VirtualBox Appliance from THIS PAGE.