Compiling a headless Linux server #
While a regular Linux client build can be run as a dedicated server using luanti --server and give the same experience, a headless server build is useful if you wish to run a Luanti server on a headless system, as it will pull in less dependencies.
This tutorial assumes your server is running Debian or some derivative. For other distributions, the package names may be different.
Building on a separate machine #
It may be useful to build the server on a separate machine from the one you deploy it to. If your host machine runs the same version of Debian as your server (i.e. both are running Debian stable) then you can simply compile there, otherwise you will have to set up a virtual build environment.
A virtual machine works well even if you are on a Windows host, but if you are on another Linux distribution you may want to use systemd-nspawn which can create a more functional chroot-like environment. The following commands will create a base Debian stable root filesystem with debootstrap and then run systemd-nspawn on it.
cd /var/lib/machines
debootstrap --include=dbus-broker,systemd-container --components=main,universe stable debian https://deb.debian.org/debian/
systemd-nspawn -D debian
Do note this only works well if your host machine and server has the same architecture.
Dependencies #
The base dependencies for a server build are as follows:
sudo apt install g++ ninja-build cmake libsqlite3-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev zlib1g-dev libgmp-dev libjsoncpp-dev libzstd-dev libncurses-dev
This dependency list includes cURL for announcing to the serverlist and ncurses for the interactive server terminal (--terminal).
Some further optional dependencies for the server:
| Dependency | Development package | Runtime package | Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| LevelDB | libleveldb-dev | TODO | LevelDB database backend |
| PostgreSQL | TODO | TODO | PostgreSQL database backend |
| Redis | TODO | TODO | Redis database backend |
| Prometheus | TODO | TODO | Prometheus statistics logging |
| Spatialindex | TODO | TODO | Spatialindex AreaStore backend |
Build LuaJIT from source #
It is recommended to build LuaJIT from source, as the version found in repositories of Debian-based distributions can be quite old.
git clone https://github.com/LuaJIT/LuaJIT luajit
cd luajit
make amalg
(luajit should be a sibling directory to the minetest directory cloned below)
Download #
Clone Luanti with Git. -b stable-5 will checkout the latest stable version to build, which may be recommended to run a server for stability reasons over the latest development version. Omitting this will clone the latest development version instead.
git clone -b stable-5 --depth 1 https://github.com/minetest/minetest.git
cd minetest
Build #
Generate a build folder set to build a headless server and not a client, as well as specifying paths to the LuaJIT we built previously.
mkdir build; cd build
cmake .. -G Ninja -DBUILD_CLIENT=0 -DBUILD_SERVER=1 -DRUN_IN_PLACE=1 -DBUILD_UNITTESTS=0 \
-DLUA_INCLUDE_DIR=../../luajit/src/ -DLUA_LIBRARY=../../luajit/src/libluajit.a
ninja
The resulting server binary can be found at ./bin/luantiserver. You can move the binary out of the source tree to somewhere cleaner to run your server out of, only other thing that is required to copy over for the server binary to work is the builtin folder.
If you are building on a separate machine from where you would want to run the server, you can run ninja package which will package up the server binary along with necessary files into a .tar.gz archive that can be deployed onto your server.