Minekube Gate documentation
Gate is an open source batteries-included, extensible & paralleled Minecraft proxy - ready for the cloud!
Gate works as a fully high performant replacement for legacy proxies or can also work alongside BungeeCord and Velocity.
Gate can run locally as a tiny single binary, in a Docker container or alongside your organization’s growing demands in a remote Kubernetes-orchestrated production environment in your cloud.
Installing the Gate CLI binary
Downloading a pre-built binary
You can download the latest pre-built binary for your operating system from the release page.
| OS | Binary Name with Processor |
|---|---|
| Windows | windows_arm64, windows_amd64 or windows_386 |
| MacOS (Apple) | darwin_amd64 or darwin_arm64 |
| Linux | linux_arm64, linux_amd64 or linux_386 |
After you have downloaded the binary make sure it is accessible from your PATH environment variable
and the file has execution permissions.
Install using Go
Since
Gate is a Go module you can easily install the latest release.
To run the following command ensure you have
Go, and
Git installed.
$ go install go.minekube.com/gate@latest
Running without installation step using Go
Using Go you could even run Gate without the installation command. Internally Go downloads and caches the module, builds and caches it and finally runs it, all at once.
$ go run go.minekube.com/gate@latest
Thanks to local caching running this command a second time would start Gate even quicker.
Why do you need a Minecraft proxy?
Use-cases
- You want to keep players connected to the proxy to move them between your different game servers like they would change the world.
- You want to enable cross game server plugins that e.g. handle player chat events or register proxy-wide commands broadcast messages and more.
- You want to intercept and log packets on the network traffic between players and servers
How does a Minecraft proxy work?
Gate presents itself as a normal Minecraft server in the player’s server list, but once the player connects Gate forwards the connection to one of the actual game servers (e.g. Minecraft vanilla, paper, spigot, sponge, etc.) to play the game.
The player can be moved around the network of Minecraft servers without fully disconnecting, since we want the player to stay connected (and not want them to re-login via the server-list every time).
Therefore, Gate reads all packets sent between players (Minecraft client) and upstream servers, logs session state changes, emits different events like Login, Disconnect, ServerConnect, Chat, Kick etc. that custom plugins/code can react to.
The advantages for using a proxy are far-reaching depending on your use-case.
Why Gate?
Some of Gate’s advantages:
- Fast and needs less resources (CPU/Memory) leading to improved scalability
- Excellent protocol version support
- Allows newest version down to 1.7
- Forge support (for modded servers)
- BungeeCord compatible plugin channels
- BungeeCord or Velocity’s player info forwarding
- A simple API for plugins/extensions
- Extend with your Go code
- Or use a script language
- Perfect for Go developers - Gate and developers immensely benefit from the Go language and its wide ecosystem
Similar to the Minecraft proxies written in Java: BungeeCord, Waterfall and Velocity (where much of the knowledge comes from) Gate delivers a rich interface to interact with connected players on your cluster of Minecraft servers.
Target users audience
Gate supports small and large Minecraft networks with a lot of concurrent players as well as developers that already (or want to) have a Go code base for their Minecraft related workloads.
If you already have all your code base in Java and/or need to use plugins for those other proxies, just stay there. Gate is for the Go ecosystem and does not have all the convenient plugins published on SpigotMC!
Although Gate targets better performance, has more version support (modded servers) and has a simpler API than the BungeeCord Java proxy, and Gate lets you write extension code in the awesome Go programming language.