I built a lightweight Discord-native Minecraft server manager because my friends couldn't do anything without me
A while back, me and my friends migrated from Aternos to my homelab server. It was great, better ping, no lag, actual performance, a far cry from Aternos 2 cores 2GB setup. The only problem was, they practically had zero control over anything.
Whenever someone wanted to do something, restart the server, grab an item, fix something while I was asleep, they were stuck. The server either had to be running 24/7, or I had to be there. Every single time, which is quite impossible to be frank.
And since we're all already hanging out in Discord anyway, I thought: "wait, I can just build a bot for this." (I have previous Discord Bot experience)
That kicked off about 4 months of internal trial and error with my friends, way before anything was close to releasable, it was mostly, absolute Garbage. Slowly figuring out what actually needed to exist and HOW to make them exist, and what my friends genuinely needed to feel like they had real control without me babysitting everything.
That became CraftDaemon. (It is Linux/systemd centric, a heads up.) And for the past ~1.5 months I've been polishing it into something I feel good shipping publicly. (currently at v1.3.2)
The core idea is pretty simple now: manage your Minecraft server entirely from Discord, no web panel stuff needed, and the core philosophy that i have is it NEEDS to be lightweight, but you do need a VPS, a server, or basically anything Linux. (WSL Might work, didnt test it (yet) )
What it currently does:
- Live console streaming + log snippets/stream
- Remote command execution with permission controls (I just added Autocomplete yesterday!)
- Server status monitoring
- Start / stop / restart controls
- Role-based access (so your friends can do things, but not everything)
- Versioned releases + full documentation (Might be a headache to look at but its there for a reason)
It's fully open source on GitHub because honestly, if this saves even one person from the "please wake up I need you to restart the server" 2am ping, that's the whole point.
GitHub: https://github.com/d1vid3d/CraftDaemon
Docs (I made a website for it too! docs is in here btw): https://craftdaemon.arcver.xyz/
Still actively working on it, but it's fully usable right now. I just genuinely hope this helps someone.