Server Stopper

If you are using Minecraft without any modifications, you will not be able to stop the server if nobody is connected. To fix this issue, you can use Server Stopper. This is a mod and a service made for this.

Architects Land does not provide compiled version of these, so you must compile it yourself. It requires Java 21, Gradle and Go 1.24+.

You can upload these to the instance. Put the jar in the mod folder (/var/minecraft/mods). Do not forget to give the permission to the minecraft user. Put the service jar in /usr/local/bin.

Download the service unit file provided in GitHub and put it in /etc/systemd/system/

curl -o /etc/systemd/system/server-stopper.service https://raw.githubusercontent.com/architects-land/server-stopper/refs/heads/main/service/server-stopper.service

Edit this if required.

Now, enables the service and start it

systemctl enable --now server-stopper.service

Can't execute binary or service?

If you can't execute the binary or the service and if your OS use SELinux (like any RHEL-based distro), use

restorecon [path]

where [path] is the path of the binary or of the service.

You can start the Minecraft server with

systemctl start minecraft.service

If the Minecraft server is empty during 5 minutes, the Minecraft server will be stopped and the instance will be powered off.

Configuration

You can customize how the service works with arguments.

The service automatically stop the instance after 5 minutes of activity. You can modify this delay with the argument --minute-before-poweroff int. The integer must be positive non-null.

In the default service unit file, there is the argument -systemd indicating that the instance is using systemd as an init. If your instance does not use it, remove this.

You can modify the UNIX socket path with the argument --socket string. If you do it, you must modify it in the mod's config (mods/server-stopper.properties).

If you want to only stop the Minecraft server and not the instance, you can use the argument -stop-only-minecraft to only stop Minecraft. (This argument must be used on a systemd Linux distribution.) The argument -minecraft-service string specifies the name of the service to stop. By default, this is minecraft.service.