CS 312 Final

Video Demo

Install any Requirements (CLI tools, Configure AWS credentials, create SSH keys, check IP addesses, etc)
Make some edits to main.tf as needed to fit your specific credentials, EC2 instance ami, SSH key file path, etc.
Use AWS Terraform to create the specified EC2 instance, install Java and Minecraft server.jar on it, and run the server
After Terraform has provisioned and installed everything for the Minecraft server, connect to the Minecraft server running on the EC2 instance from Minecraft instance (or by using telnet CLI tool)

Have AWS CLI installed: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/getting-started-install.html
- In case it is relevant, I am on WSL2 (Windows Subsystems on Linux 2), Ubuntu version
- So, I followed the instructions for installing AWS CLI for Linux as specified by the link above
Create file ~/.aws/credentials and put in the credentials from AWS Academy Learner Lab > AWS Details
- Regardless of if you are on AWS Academy, you will still need to configure aws_access_key_id, aws_secret_access_key, and aws_session_token in ~/.aws/credentials
Install AWS Terraform CLI here: https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/tutorials/aws-get-started/install-cli
- I used Linux (rightmost option) > Ubuntu/Debian, since my WSL2 instance is Ubuntu OS
- Follow prompts in tutorial linked above
To authenticate the Terraform provider, run export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID= and export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY= in terminal
You will need an SSH Key pair, run ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 2048 in terminal
- The id_rsa.pub left in the project root directory is just an example, please replace them with your SSH keys! - Also I did not include my private key id_rsa for obvious security reasons but your public and private keys should be in same directory
- I put these in my project directory but you could put them wherever, as long as you adjust the relative file paths in the code (more on this below)

Run aws ec2 describe-images --owners amazon --filters "Name=name,Values=amzn*" --query 'sort_by(Images, &CreationDate)[].Name'
- Reference
I chose amzn2-ami-ecs-hvm-2.0.20210623-x86_64-ebs as it's x86_64 (matching the architecture of the Java version used in main.tf), and it also supports t2.small instance type (minimum size to run this kind of minecraft server)
Run aws ec2 describe-images --owners amazon --filters "Name=name,Values=amzn2-ami-ecs-hvm-2.0.20210623-x86_64-ebs" --query 'Images[0].ImageId' --output text
- This returns the actual ami value
- Or substitute amzn2-ami-ecs-hvm-2.0.20210623-x86_64-ebs with the image of your choice
- Edit the ami value in line 49 of main.tf to match the output of the above aws ec2 describe-images... command
- Reference: ChatGPT June 2023 version
Run curl ifconfig.me to get your local public IP address, and copy the result to line 22 of main.tf (read this as cidr_blocks = ["<local public ip address>/32"])
In case you have your SSH key pair in a directory other than the project directory root, then adjust line 45 of main.tf
Go to https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/download/server
- Right click minecraft_server..jar link here, copy link
- Edit line 60 to use this the link you just copied

If you didn't already, run cd 312-final (or whatever you named the repo folder locally), so you are in the project directory in terminal < insert edits to main.tf ami and also ssh keygen>
Run terraform init
Run terraform fmt
Run terraform validate
Run terraform apply
Note the public IP address of your newly created EC2 instance which will be printed to the console
- Watch for an output that starts with instance_public_ip
Wait for a few minutes
- Debug Tip: You can run ssh -i <private key file path> ec2-user@<EC2 public key file path> to manually SSH into the EC2 instance and see what's going on, for example run java to see if Java has installed itself yet
In the meantime you can run telnet <EC2 public IP> 25565 to see if Java has finished installing and the Minecraft server has started yet
- The EC2 public IP here refers to the public IP address of the EC2 instance that is printed after terraform apply finishes running, to clarify
If so, you can open Minecraft client (1.20.1 version) and connect to your new Minecraft server. Go to Multiplayer > Direct Connection > your EC2 public IP