minestrate

Isolated Minecraft minigame servers, on demand. REST API over Docker, written in Go.

Quickstart

Note

Requires Docker running on the host and Go 1.22+.

# 1. Clone and build
git clone https://github.com/mitsuakki/minestrate
cd minestrate
go build -o minestrate .

# 2. Configure
cp minestrate.example.yaml minestrate.yaml
# edit minestrate.yaml

# 3. Run
./minestrate --config minestrate.yaml

Why

Running a Minecraft minigame lobby means spinning up isolated game servers on player demand and tearing them down cleanly when the game ends. Doing this by hand doesn't scale. Doing it with a full Kubernetes cluster is overkill.

minestrate is a single Go binary that exposes a REST API over the Docker socket.

• One POST creates an isolated PocketMine-MP server with its own network, port, and lifecycle.
• One DELETE drains and removes it.

How it works

flowchart TD
    %% Node Definitions
    A["Lobby"] -->|"POST /servers"| B["REST Gateway\nJWT · rate limit · TLS"]
    B --> C["FSM Orchestrator\nworker pool"]
    C --> D["Resource Allocator\nports · subnets"]
    C --> E["Docker Engine\nUnix socket"]
    E --> F["container A\n/28 · port"]
    E --> G["container B\n/28 · port"]
    E --> H["container C\n/28 · port"]

    %% Class Assignments
    class A frontend
    class B,C gateway
    class D,E infra
    class F,G,H containers

    %% Style Definitions
    classDef frontend fill:#f5f6fa,stroke:#0984e3,stroke-width:2px,color:#2d3436
    classDef gateway fill:#f5f6fa,stroke:#6c5ce7,stroke-width:2px,color:#2d3436
    classDef infra fill:#f5f6fa,stroke:#e17055,stroke-width:2px,color:#2d3436
    classDef containers fill:#f5f6fa,stroke:#00b894,stroke-width:2px,color:#2d3436

    %% Link Styling
    linkStyle default stroke:#b2bec3,stroke-width:2px,color:#d63031

Loading

API

Important

All endpoints require a Bearer JWT issued by the lobby.

Create a server

POST /servers

Request:

POST /servers
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "game":    "skywars",
  "players": 8
}

Get server state

GET /servers/{id}

{
  "id": "srv_01j4k",
  "state": "running",
  "address": "10.0.0.1",
  "port": 25565,
  "players": 4,
  "created": "2024-11-01T14:22:00Z"
}

Stop a server

DELETE /servers/{id}

Transitions the server to draining. Players are notified, then the container is stopped and all resources are released. Returns 202 Accepted.

List servers

GET /servers

Returns the projection of all active servers. Stopped servers are not included.

Design Decisions

Port allocation is a pure injection.

The allocator maintains a bitset over the configured port range and reserves ports atomically with a CAS operation. Two servers can never share a port by construction; it is an invariant enforced at the data structure level, not a runtime check.

Server lifecycle is a finite state machine.

The five states and their transitions are the only mutations allowed on a server record. Every HTTP handler maps to exactly one transition. This makes the system straightforward to reason about: if you know the current state, you know every possible next state.

Worker pool is sized by M/M/c queueing theory.

Given a measured mean container start time $1/\mu$ and an expected peak request rate $\lambda$, the number of workers $c$ satisfies:

$$\rho = \frac{\lambda}{c\mu} < 0.8$$

Beyond 0.8 utilisation, queue wait times grow non-linearly. The default of 4 workers handles up to $3.2\mu$ requests per second before queueing becomes noticeable.

Network isolation is structural.

Each container receives a dedicated /28 subnet carved from the configured block. Subnets are disjoint by construction; game servers cannot reach each other's networks unless explicitly routed.

Authentication is stateless.

JWT verification is $O(1)$ and requires no database round-trip. The lobby signs tokens with a shared secret; minestrate verifies the signature and checks expiry. No session store, no distributed state.

Start timeout is derived from measured variance.

The start_timeout value should be set to $\mu_T + 10\sigma_T$ where $\mu_T$ is the mean container start time and $\sigma_T$ its standard deviation, measured on your hardware. This bound (from Chebyshev's inequality) keeps false timeouts below 1% under any start time distribution.

Configuration

# minestrate.yaml
env: prod

server:
  port: 8080
  tls_cert: "" # Optional: path to your cert.pem
  tls_key: ""  # Optional: path to your key.pem

auth:
  jwt_secret: "your-secret"
  token_ttl: 300

docker:
  socket: "" # Default platform socket (e.g. /var/run/docker.sock or npipe:////./pipe/docker_engine)
  image: pmmp/pocketmine-mp:latest
  cpu_limit: 1.0
  memory_limit: 512m

orchestrator:
  workers: 4
  max_servers: 100
  start_timeout: 30

ports:
  range_start: 19132
  range_end: 20132

network:
  subnet_block: 172.20.0.0/14

Metrics

On this hardware (AMD Ryzen 7 4800H, 8 Cores, 16GB RAM, Windows 11 Pro), the mean Docker container start time ($\mu$) was measured using a baseline alpine image:

Metric	Value
Mean start time ($1/\mu$)	1.18s
Throughput ($\mu$)	0.85 starts/sec

Worker Pool Throughput

The following benchmark measures the throughput of the orchestrator worker pool with varying numbers of workers ($c$). To simulate realistic load, an artificial delay of 100ms was added to each container creation job.

Workers ($c$)	Throughput (starts/sec)	Scaling
1	9.94	1.0x
2	19.89	2.0x
4	38.79	3.9x

These values confirm that the system scales linearly with the number of workers until it hits the host's I/O or Docker socket bottlenecks.

These values are used to tune the worker pool size and start timeout as described in the Design Decisions section.

License

MIT