Building Minecraft-Overviewer

This page documents the process for building and configuring of Minecraft-Overviewer on a Debian 6.0 server. We will be installing to the /opt directory, and will assume you have an unprivilaged account named “minecraft” that you run the server with.

Pre-Install all of the required packages used to download and build Minecraft-Overviewer.

apt-get install -y git ant subversion sun-java6-jdk python-numpy python-imaging

Install Minecraft-Biome-Extractor
https://github.com/overviewer/minecraft-biome-extractor

cd /opt
git clone git://github.com/overviewer/minecraft-biome-extractor.git
cd minecraft-biome-extractor
ant
cd ..
chown -R minecraft:minecraft minecraft-biome-extractor

Install Overviewer
https://github.com/overviewer/Minecraft-Overviewer

cd /opt
git clone git://github.com/overviewer/Minecraft-Overviewer.git
cd Minecraft-Overviewer
python setup.py build
cd ..
chown -R minecraft:minecraft Minecraft-Overviewer

Next we need to install the minecraft client jar so Overviewer can get the terrain data.

wget -N http://s3.amazonaws.com/MinecraftDownload/minecraft.jar -P /home/minecraft/.minecraft/bin/
chown minecraft:minecraft /home/minecraft/.minecraft/bin/minecraft.jar

Check that the file installed properly with the following command.

/opt/Minecraft-Overviewer/overviewer.py --check-terrain

OPTIONAL: PlayerMarkers
https://github.com/overviewer/Minecraft-Overviewer-Addons/tree/master/PlayerMarkers

Check out Minecraft-Overviewer-Addons Repository and build

cd /opt
git clone git://github.com/overviewer/Minecraft-Overviewer-Addons.git
chown -R minecraft:minecraft Minecraft-Overviewer-Addons
cp -R Minecraft-Overviewer-Addons/PlayerMarkers/plugins/MapMarkers/* /opt/minecraft/jar/plugins/
cp -R Minecraft-Overviewer-Addons/PlayerMarkers/playermarkers /opt/overviewer/Minecraft-Overviewer/overviewer_core/data/web_assets/

Script
Next we tie it all together with a script. Copy and paste the following code, and save it to /opt/minecraft/bin/overviewer-render.sh

#!/bin/bash

##############################################
# This script will render a map of your 
# minecraft world, using Minecraft-Overviewer
##############################################

# This runs the minecraft-biome-extractor,used by minecraft-overviewer for biome data
java -jar /opt/minecraft-biome-extractor/BiomeExtractor.jar -jar /opt/minecraft/jar/mojang/minecraft_server.jar -nogui /opt/minecraft/jar/world

# This runs minecraft-overviewer and will output the rendering to /var/www/world to be hosted by apache
python /opt/Minecraft-Overviewer/overviewer.py --rendermodes=lighting,night,spawn,cave /opt/minecraft/jar/world /var/www/world

Next we need to change ownership and make the script executable.

chown minecraft:minecraft /opt/minecraft/bin/overviewer-render.sh
chmod 774 /opt/minecraft/bin/overviewer-render.sh

Cron Job
Set this to automatically run from cron from the “minecraft” user account. In this example, overviewer will render the map at 15 minutes past the hours of 3am, and 3pm, daily. Depending on the size of your world, and the speed of the machine used to render, this process can take several hours to complete.

su minecraft -
crontab -e
15 3,15 * * * /opt/minecraft/bin/overviewer-render.sh

Optimize
Next you will want to setup a script to optimize the output of Overviewer. Head over to Optimize with pngcrush