Minecraft server setup

This project was basically my hello world for Rust.

We have a local Minecraft server that me and my siblings use and this was previously done by using a long bash command that would evecute a .jar within a directory to run minecraft however it was very messy and needed to be adjusted manually to change settings.

After reading up a decent chunk on the official Rust book and doing the tutorials I got into making the selector for settings to run the server (that had previously needed manual changing of the command run). Through this I learned about Rust's differences with how logic is done, due to variables being limited to the scope it is in I would put the user input into a seperate function as to not let the code balloon with loads of variables set exclusively to take an input.

An early iteration of the function used for inputs.

Once I had the selection system functional I began working on executing the .jar through Rust code. From looking online I came to the stdin library and implemented the command and voilà! the server was up and running with the settings I had selected, however I was not getting an interface and there was no way to input anything into the running server from the terminal. This was not good enough as I couldn't safely shut down the server without the command to do so, so I turned to stack overflow. I created this thread asking for solutions and got a very fast response letting me know how to put the instance on a child thread. I was also using the .output() function instead of the .spawn() function, which waits for the process to finish instead of allowing inputs. After this I got another suggestion that would help me use more Rust and less bash by navigating directories with the std::fs library in Rust - and after applying all of the code I ended up with a 1.0 version of the program. I've since fixed bugs and added more options but its less problem solving and logic to implement than the initial project.

A later iteration of the launch server code.

Conclusion

Overall I think this project really had more going on than it seemed on the surface, using threads, stdin and fs I think it was a really good introductory project to get me into the language and it is still getting the occasional tweak while being in use currently.