michd / mcdesign

A tool I made in 2011 to sketch out Minecraft ideas in 2D

Minecraft design tool

** Note ** This is an old project I haven't touched in a long time. I'm only publishing its source because someone asked and I somehow hadn't already.

This tool lets you setch out Minecraft design ideas in 2D with some of the available materials in the game. It lets you save these designs to a database so they can be shared with friends, or you export the design to JSON so you can save it on your own computer.

You can check the version as of 2022-08-27 on mcdesign.michd.me.

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The portion for saving designs to a database is a Sinatra application, backed with ActiveRecord. I'm running it with a MySQL database.

Note that in your server configuration, you must specify the following environment variables for said database:

• MCDESIGN_MYSQL_USER - Username to access the database
• MCDESIGN_MYSQL_PWD - Password for same
• MCDESIGN_MYSQL_DB - Database name

It's assumed that the database runs on the same machine as the application, thus localhost.

If that's not the case, change it in mcdesign.rb.

Contributing

Since there seems to be interest, I'm open to reviewing pull requests for adding new materials to the tool.

If doing so, please ensure that the existing numbers for materials keep working; older designs made in it will use different materials.

Vagrant development environment

For convenience, a vagrant development environment is provided.

It is set up to serve MCDesign at mcdesign.vagrant, with a default IP of 192.168.56.15. Add this to your system's hosts file.

SSL

To enable SSL in the development environment, install minica from https://github.com/jsha/minica

1. Run minica --domains mcdesign.vagrant This will create a root cert and private key in the same folder named minica.pem and a key minica-key.pem. It will also create the folder mcdesign.vagrant containing cert.pem and key.pem.
2. Move the mcdesign.vagrant folder into vagrant-setup/
3. Copy minica.pem into that same mcdesign.vagrant/ folder
4. Install the minica.pem root certificate for your system or browser. If you're using Firefox: Preferences > Privacy & Security > Certificates > View Certificates > Authorities > Import Then restart Firefox.

If you don't want to use SSL, you'll have to edit vagrant-setup/mcdesign.local.conf before provisioning.

If you did the above SSL setup after provisioning the vagrant box, you'll have to restart the nginx service or the box itself.

Virtual machine setup

1. Install Vagrant on your dev machine
2. Install VirtualBox on your dev machine
3. Clone this repository
4. Open a terminal and navigate to the root folder of this repository
5. Run vagrant up. This one will take a while, go do something else while you wait.
6. Once finished, the script will tell you what to add to your hosts file. See "editing the hosts file"
7. Fire up your browser and navigate to mcdesign.local
8. Have fun doing some coding