Tutorials/Create a Mac OS X startup daemon

Creating a proper and safe Mac OS X daemon is a relatively hard task, and this document is a work in progress. It works for me, it might not for you. Please refrain from doing so unless you know your way around Terminal and Console, and you have a good analytical mind that will tell you whenever you are doing mistakes. Take this text as a helping hand, not as a full "run this package and it works" text. You know about Creepers? Imagine one blowing up in the innards of your OS! You don't want that, do you?

This page will help you make your Minecraft server securely run without having to log in as a user. It has been tested on Mac OS X Server Snow Leopard and Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Your mileage will vary elsewhere, as the commands have changed a little bit.

Before even attempting this, you should run a server instance by hand, to make sure everything works. If you are able to run your server and actually connect to it from a remote computer, you can start thinking about creating a daemon.

Word of interest about sudo
I use  every single command I need to do as root. Many people will tell you to do  and be done with it. That's a valid argument, but it's also much more dangerous to do so. Forgetting you're as root and doing something awkward gives you more chances to destroy your computer.

It's also the reason why I first move to the proper folder and then do the action for a precise file or folder; I've had too many people in my life telling me they mistakenly pressed return while doing a nasty command and applied it to their whole computer... me included! I learned the hard way, and on that note, I'd like to thank my first Internet server provider for not giving me root access or else their computer would've been 'ed at least once.

Final reason, every sudo command is logged in your Console, meaning you know what happens, and if you made something incorrect, you can review your log and know what you did to try to repair it. Doing a  will only show that. But then, it's your computer, it's your habits, do whatever you want with it!

To do list

 * Port mapping is not supported in this version
 * The server doesn't properly close at system shutdown. This will need to be investigated
 * Backup should have its user, have trap, and actually suggest one backup scheme, like a rsync incremental backup or something. But who uses that anyways when there's Time Machine to the rescue :)

Creating a _minecraft daemon user and group
This section is technically optional, but for security considerations, you should do it the hard way.

The easiest (and evil) way
And you are done! Congratulations! That will make your Minecraft application run as root, meaning if someone hacks your computer through Minecraft, it'll be able to do anything he wants, including viewing and modifying all your files, or simply deleting your computer into oblivion. Seriously, you do not want that! Please go to the Hard way and sweat your way. I'm a completionist, so I tell you the possibility to run it like that, but please don't ... please ...ok
 * 1) Don't do anything (Please make sure to modify the launchd plist file to remove the RunAsUser part)

The easy (and incorrect) way
And you are done! Congratulations! However, this creates a full fledged user, whilst Mac OS X expects a daemon user. As a side bonus, you can run this as your own personal user, or any other possibilities for users. But then, if your Minecraft user gets hacked, the hacker will have a full account to have fun, accessing all your software, and be able to modify everything that's public. It's not the best.
 * 1) Click on Apple menu item
 * 2) Open System Preferences
 * 3) Click on System: Accounts
 * 4) Click on the lock in order to unlock the page
 * 5) Enter your administrator password
 * 6) Click on the Plus button
 * 7) Create a new Standard user, named Minecraft (Please make sure to modify the launchd plist file saying you are using a different user) with a password
 * 8) Click Ok

The hard (and correct) way
The user will be created with an underscore first, denoting it's a daemon and should be hidden from user view. It will also be created with a daemon UID. We will use dscl to create a user and group. Obviously, it needs to be done with privileges. Open Terminal and type MyMac:~ myuser$ sudo dscl Password: (your password) Entering interactive mode... (type "help" for commands) Let's move to the base folder for what we need to do (less typing) > cd /Local/Default/ /Local/Default > If you are running a Mac OS X Server use Apple's supplied Workgroup Manager [WGM] to create the user, group and home folders with minimal effort. Make sure you use ID numbers less than 1024 (300 is used in this example).

If you have other directory authentication, you might have to move to an other folder instead of Local. Use the  command to view the different folders. To know if you are in the good place, you should have a Users folder with different underscore-prefixed names (like _coreaudiod, _softwareupdate and _www).

Creating the group (GID)
/Local/Default > ls Groups gid This will show up a list of all the created groups on your computer, along with their GIDs. We don't care what they are, we just want an empty GID, potentially in the daemon range (less than 500). Verify if 300 is unused. /Local/Default > create Groups/_minecraft /Local/Default > create Groups/_minecraft PrimaryGroupID 300 At this point, your group should be created, and assigned the 300 (or any number you chose) GID. You can verify it with the  command and you can compare it to others with the   command.

Creating the user (UID)
/Local/Default > ls Users uid This will show up a list of all the created users on your computer, along with their UIDs. Again, we don't care what they are, we just want an empty UID, again in the daemon range (less than 500). Verify if 300 is unused. You can select a different UID and GID, they need not to be identical, but it's certainly tidier if they are. /Local/Default > create Users/_minecraft UserShell /bin/bash /Local/Default > create Users/_minecraft UniqueID 300 /Local/Default > create Users/_minecraft PrimaryGroupID 300 /Local/Default > create Users/_minecraft NFSHomeDirectory /Users/_minecraft This created your user. Obviously you need to modify the UniqueID (UID) for the one you chose in this step, and the PrimaryGroupID for the one you chose in the previous section. You can also choose a different home directory. I put my Minecraft folder with the other users, but you can put this anywhere you want, really.

Like for the GID, you can use  and   to make sure everything is all right.

Now, we said to the user we have a group (PrimaryGroupID) but we need to tell the group it has users: /Local/Default > append Groups/_minecraft GroupMembership _minecraft

And we're done! /Local/Default > exit Goodbye

 You might want something like this to prevent the user from showing up in the login dropdown:

sudo dscl. delete /Users/_minecraft AuthenticationAuthority sudo dscl. create /Users/_minecraft Password "*" 

Creating the user home
We now need to create the home folder. Assuming you previously described it as, please type: MyMac:~ myuser$ cd /Users MyMac:Users myuser$ sudo mkdir _minecraft MyMac:Users myuser$ sudo chown _minecraft:_minecraft _minecraft

MyMac:Users myuser$ ls -la Whoa, there are many  here! Here is a version where you can understand something (don't go run this, that said!) cd /Users sudo mkdir UserFolder sudo chown UserName:GroupName UserFolder ls -la Here ... better! If these commands go through, it means your user and group were properly created in the previous steps. At this point, the ls -la should give you something like total 0 drwxr-xr-x  5 root        admin        170 15 jui  2010. drwxrwxr-x@ 34 root       admin       1224  6 jan 23:33 .. -rw-r--r--  1 root        wheel          0  1 jul  2009 .localized drwxrwxrwt  5 root        wheel        170 30 sep 20:18 Shared drwxr-xr-x+ 27 _minecraft _minecraft     0 26 feb 12:54 _minecraft drwxr-xr-x+ 27 sakamura   staff        918 10 nov 21:48 sakamura

Moving the server files
That's a walk in the park compared to what we went through. First, make sure your Minecraft server is not actually running, or you'll definitely lose data! Then... MyMac:~ myuser$ cd /Users/_minecraft MyMac:_minecraft myuser$ sudo mv ~/Desktop/Minecraft\ Server/*. MyMac:_minecraft myuser$ sudo chown -R _minecraft:_minecraft * Of course, you want to adjust as needed, with the starting path being where you actually installed your Minecraft server in the first place, and please look-up the previous section for an explanation of the chown command. ''And please don't forget the dot at the end of the mv command, it's barely visible but it's there, it means the destination is our current folder! Otherwise, command will fail''

Tip #1: If you press Tab once, it will auto-complete the name of the file/folder for you. That's very useful for quickly writing special characters like the evil space bar that needs to be written with a backslash first.

Tip #2: If you press Tab twice, it will show you all possible auto-completion possibilities, to give you a quick choice if you forgot how it's actually written.

Tip for the astute reader: Instead of doing a chown once in the previous step, and a chown at this step, it's quicker to simply move the folder, and chown -R the resulting folder. One less command. The reason why I do it twice is to make sure your User and Group are properly created in the previous step. But no reason.

Support files
You need a few files in order to make this work adequately. It could be done with less files, but it's more readable that way. Please copy them carefully and modify what has to be modified accordingly. I personally use vim as a text editor since it keeps my carriage returns at their proper places and doesn't try to be intelligent with me. However, it's also (with emacs) one of the hardest editor to use, from another era. GUI-wise, Apple TextEdit should be fine for this, as long as you follow the instructions from the Mac OS X Setting up a server page (IE: Make as Plain Text).

minecraft.command
trap 'echo "$(date) Killing Minecraft."; ./stop.sh; exit' TERM ipconfig waitall echo "$(date) Starting minecraft." ./start.sh & wait echo "$(date) Minecraft done."
 * 1) !/bin/bash

Explanation
Back in school, I'm doing so much learning.

Termination
Mac OS X Launchd sends a SIGTERM (control-c or signal 15) to kill a daemon. Java plain returns when it receives one. Hence you need to  it before it reaches java. The whole  code could be added to the trap line (with many   and , but it'd be messy.)

The  script needs to be asynchronously started and   upon, as trap needs to exit   to execute properly See trap examples and explanation here.

start.sh
touch stdin.commandlist tail -n 0 -f stdin.commandlist | java -Xmx1G -Xms1G -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui
 * 1) !/bin/bash

stop.sh
PID=`lsof -i -P | grep ':25565 (LISTEN)' | awk '{print $2}'` if [ "$PID" != "" ]; then echo "Killing MineCraft Server PID=$PID" kill -TERM $PID else echo "MineCraft not running" fi
 * 1) !/bin/bash

stdin redirection
In the other Unix-like systems, the  command is used to create a separate screen TTY to execute the java system in. The main advantage being to be able to switch to that screen if someone wants to directly interact with the server. That would work if you were to put the launchd plist in your personal user folder, but it will not work in the startup daemon, and it's specifically not supported by launchd, although you can get an up-to-date screen that won't cause problems.

There are multiple ways to send out commands, including a mkfifo that will work well, but will cause problems with carriage returns. So I prefer to use a file, and append the commands I want to send to the java through a pipe.

Termination
The tail command will automatically terminate once java terminates.



Support files - A Variant
The above didn't work for me for several reasons: the tail command never terminated, and launchd wasn't working properly with start.sh and stop.sh running in subshells. Also, I liked the idea of a clean shutdown where the server is told to save-all and stop rather than just being killed.

minecraft.command: trap 'echo "$(date) Killing Minecraft.";. ./stop.sh' HUP INT TERM ipconfig waitall echo "$(date) Starting minecraft." . ./start.sh wait `cat minecraft.pid` echo "$(date) Minecraft done."
 * 1) !/bin/bash

In the above we source start.sh and stop.sh, rather than running them in subshells. We need java to run in the background though, so start.sh is changed to do that. It also saves the PID in minecraft.pid. Because tail wasn't exiting, I used a fifo too.

start.sh: rm -f command-fifo mkfifo command-fifo java -Xmx1G -Xms1G -jar craftbukkit.jar nogui <> command-fifo & echo $! >| minecraft.pid
 * 1) !/bin/bash

Note that if you do not use craftbukkit, but rather the regular server. where it reads "craftbukkit.jar" it should read "minecraft_server.jar" Finally stop is changed to stop the server cleanly.

stop.sh: PID=`cat minecraft.pid` if [ "$PID" != "" ]; then echo "Stopping MineCraft Server PID=$PID" echo save-all >> command-fifo echo stop >> command-fifo wait $PID rm minecraft.pid echo "MineCraft shutdown complete." else echo "MineCraft not running" fi
 * 1) !/bin/bash



net.minecraft.server.plist
 <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC -//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd >  Label net.minecraft.server ProgramArguments ./minecraft.command RunAtLoad WorkingDirectory /Users/_minecraft UserName _minecraft Please modify your  accordingly, or remove that section altogether if you wish to run it as root. You should also modify your  to point to the proper path. The label is what will be shown in the Console tool.

Shell scripts
Once you have created your files on your desktop, you can copy them: MyMac:~ myuser$ cd /Users/_minecraft MyMac:_minecraft myuser$ sudo cp ~/Desktop/minecraft.command ~/Desktop/start.sh ~/Desktop/stop.sh. MyMac:_minecraft myuser$ sudo chmod 755 minecraft.command start.sh stop.sh MyMac:_minecraft myuser$ sudo chown _minecraft:_minecraft minecraft.command start.sh stop.sh Again, don't forget the dot at the end of  command.

You can try executing them (since you are in the good folder, it will work): MyMac:_minecraft myuser$ sudo -u _minecraft ./minecraft.command The command itself should never return, that's all right, but the server should properly start without any error messages, and you should see the java environment being started. You can do  to terminate the server. Although it seems inviting, you cannot really run any commands from that console, as stdin was redirected from a file, But if you wish, you can start a 2nd terminal and issue commands like  and they should execute.

Launch daemon
We need to tell Mac OS X we wish to start the daemon with the computer when it starts, before you get to the login screen. That's a mere copy away from that point: MyMac:~ myuser$ cd /Library/LaunchDaemons MyMac:LaunchDaemons myuser$ sudo cp ~/Desktop/net.minecraft.server.plist. MyMac:LaunchDaemons myuser$ sudo chmod 755 net.minecraft.server.plist MyMac:LaunchDaemons myuser$ sudo chown root:wheel net.minecraft.server.plist At this point, when you reboot your computer, it should automatically start your server! You can try it out immediately using the following line: MyMac:LaunchDaemons myuser$ sudo launchctl load net.minecraft.server.plist That should load your Minecraft server in its proper user. You should verify it's there and without errors by going to Console and looking at the System Log. You should also verify in the Activity Monitor tool the process was started, and is running under the _minecraft user. Obviously, trying to run a Minecraft game might be a nice thing to do.

At any time, you can unload the server (but remember it will start automatically when you reboot your computer unless you move away the file: MyMac:LaunchDaemons myuser$ sudo launchctl unload net.minecraft.server.plist

Automatic Startup/Shutdown
You may wish to not have your server running all the time if no one is connected to it. This can be accomplished with just one more script :)

Before setting this up, get the 'Varient' method above working, as I found this to work best with it.

server_daemon.command
Instead of setting the launchd  file to run , set it to run   instead, after placing it in the server directory.
 * 1) !/bin/bash

while : do # listen for connections ipconfig waitall nc -l 25565 | tail -c +19 | tr -d ' ' > user.txt
 * 1) main loop

MATCHES=$(grep -f user.txt white-list.txt | wc -l | tr -d ' ') rm user.txt

# if not, listen for connections if [ $MATCHES -eq 0 ] then continue fi

# launch server control script ./minecraft_server.command & commandPID=$!

# check periodically for activity while : do		sleep 15 connections=$(lsof | grep 25565 | grep -v -e LISTEN | wc -l | tr -d " ") # if none detected, terminate control script, and listen for connections if [ $connections -eq 0 ] then kill -TERM $commandPID wait $commandPID break fi done done

Explanation
This script listens for activity on the default Minecraft port, 25565 and runs the server when a connection is made. Because Minecraft clients send the username upon first contact, this script uses that to check if the player has access to the server, and ignores them if they don't. This could be changed to allow anyone to remotely start the server by removing the 'if' statement. Note that users must connect twice on a cold run: once to launch the server, and again once it is up and running.

Next, the script simply checks periodically to see if there are any active connection on the Minecraft port, and if not, it waits for the server to shutdown before listening again for more connections.

Areas for Improvement
This script creates a lot of temporary files in the server directory, maybe they could be put in /tmp or in a temporary subdirectory?

This script does not use environment variables to customize settings such as port number and timeout interval.

Backup considerations
It's quite easy to start up regular backups. By extension, adding a backup  and command file is nearly a no-brainer. The following code will execute every hour, only when Minecraft is actually running, will stop the save, wait for the console to show saving was done, and start it back after you're done backing it up.

Tip #1: add your own backup code at the comment, or else, it will do nothing :)

Tip #2: this code runs as root. You can make it run as another user if you wish, like creating a second user in the same _minecraft group, meaning the backup system will be able to read the files but not modify them. That's left to the reader!

Tip #3: this code might receive a shutdown request, so there really should be a  command or else it could get interrupted while it's backing up.

net.minecraft.server.backup.plist
 <!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC -//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd >  Label net.minecraft.server.backup ProgramArguments ./backup.command RunAtLoad StartInterval 3600 	 WorkingDirectory /Users/_minecraft

backup.command
ps -u _minecraft >/dev/null 2>/dev/null if [ $? != 0 ]; then echo $(date) Minecraft off: cannot backup. exit fi
 * 1) !/bin/bash

echo save-off >> stdin.commandlist echo save-all >> stdin.commandlist tail -n 3 -f /var/log/system.log | while read line do if echo $line | grep -q 'CONSOLE: Save complete.'; then # add up your backup commands here, like svn or rsync echo save-on >> stdin.commandlist exit 0 fi done

= Tying it up = That's a good starting point IMHO, but it still needs more love. Please don't hesitate to call me up in the discussion to tidy this up. I also know it's not really wiki-esque and more howto-esque, I assume benevolent users (and also users with English as their native language) will help me in this task.