MWDH

MWDH stands for "Minecraft World Download Hoster" and is a command line utility (CLI), Minecraft world file compressor and HTTP file server to easily provide a world download for your Minecraft server's world.

Features

• Blazingly fast 🔥🚀 - Uses Rust, zstd and parallel compression to compress a 4000x4000 world in less than a second 🤯¹
• Self-hosted - No cloud storage fees or upload waits
• Simple - One command and you're hosting!

Intro / Motivation

Picture this: You're the admin of an SMP server, the season just ended and everyone is screaming for a world download. Of course, you don't want all the good work and memories go to waste, so you want to help.

But it seems kinda like a chore to package up gibibytes on gibibytes of world files and then somehow find a way to make them downloadable for everyone? Manually fiddling with commands or random tools and then throwing money into big companies' throats for cloud storage when you're already hosting your own server?

NAH, that sh*t STINKS!

I understand you. Of course you want to just host your own world download.

Well, look no more because on a couple sleepless nights I wrote this lil CLI/HTTP server thing that allows you to do just that with minimal setup. With just a single command it compresses and packages up an archive of the world and then hosts it for others to download. Yay! And leveraging Rust, concurrent programming and zstd, you won't have to wait ages until the gosh-darned thang is compressed and uploaded to Google Drive! Double yay!

Quick Start

1. Install: Check out the releases tab to download a pre-built binary for your specific system or use the install script.

2. Run the ol' command:

   mwdh ch -w <server-dir> -one

   or if you're on a bukkit-based server (Spigot/Paper), pass the --bukkit flag:

   mwdh ch -w <server-dir> -one --bukkit

   Alternatively, make sure that your current working directory is the server directory containing the world directories and just do:

   mwdh ch -one

   or

   mwdh ch -one --bukkit

3. Once it says "Hosting world files at", open your web browser at <your-server-ip>:3000/world and it should download the file! ez peezy :)

Warning

If you're on a Bukkit-based Minecraft server (CraftBukkit, Spigot, Paper, Purpur) you should include the --bukkit flag. Or else, when deciding to not include the Nether and End (by just passing -o), it will still include the Nether and End :( This is because these servers use a different file structure than vanilla or even Fabric servers. In vanilla, the main world directory contains all the dimensions. On Bukkit-based servers, the dimensions are split up into multiple directories (world, world_nether, world_the_end). If you pass the --bukkit flag, MWDH will consider that specialty.

Note

The downloaded file should be a .tar.zst file which is a zstd archive. On Windows you can only² decompress it using external programs like 7-zip or WinRAR. There is also the official CLI from zstd you can download for Windows by scrolling down on this page But if you want to be more compatible you can change the compression format to ZIP by passing in --compression-format zip which compresses much slower (about 5x) and may have worse compression ratios compared to some configurations with the zstd format. ZIP might suck for bigger worlds.

Only hosting or only compressing

It is possible to use MWDH just for compressing your worlds or for hosting an already existing archive. This is useful when you already have a huge ass file but just wanted to change some hosting settings. To host an already existing archive you can do:

mwdh host -a <path-to-archive> [OPTIONS]

To just compress a world you could do:

mwdh compress -w <server-dir> -l=-3

Note that to pass a negative compression level (which is used by the zstd algorithm) we have to add a little = behind the -l argument. You can also omit the compression level to let MWDH choose a default.

Firewall Settings

You may need to fiddle around with your proxy/firewall settings so that others can actually reach the port from the external network n stuff. An internet search "open firewall port on " might do the trick.

MWDH's default port number is 3000, but if you need to change that you easily can by passing the --port or -p argument:

mwdh [...] -p <port>

Configuring UFW (uncomplicated firewall)

If your server is running Ubuntu Linux or similar and/or you have ufw installed you might wanna try:

sudo ufw allow <port-number>/tcp

and make sure it's enabled:

sudo ufw enable

Building From Source

If you don't trust me or 'dist' that the binaries are actually cool n all, you can of course build them yourself:

1. Make sure you have Rust and Cargo installed

2. Clone the repo and replace <release-tag> with your desired release:

   git clone --depth 1 --branch <release-tag> https://github.com/earomc/mwdh.git

3. Invoke Cargo:

   cargo b -r

Note about platform compatibility

This repo only provides pre-built binaries for Linux because pretty much all servers and therefore pretty much all Minecraft Servers are on Linux. But even though it hasn't been tested, I see no specific reason why MWDH shouldn't work on Windows or Mac. You could use it to compress your local Minecraft worlds by instead of the server directory passing your saves directory. But ... imma be real you could prolly just use 7-zip for that.

Footnotes

1. on my trusty 16GB RAM, Ryzen 5 7520U Laptop 😌 ↩

2. At the time of writing this at least, Windows doesnt have built-in support :( ↩