gate

README

The Minecraft Proxy (alpha)

Gate is an extensible Minecraft proxy written in Go

This project is in its early stages, not yet ready for production and subject to have breaking changes, but you can already start playing around with it!

It will be tested & used in production by the Minekube network when there is a "stable enough" release.

Features

• Fast
• Excellent server version support
  • Newest version down to 1.7 (+forge support)
  • Bungeecord plugins compatible (plugin messages)
  • Velocity's player forwarding mode
• Quick installation
  • simply pick a download from the releases
  • or quickly run our docker image!
    • docker run -it --rm -p 25565:25565 registry.gitlab.com/minekube/gate:latest
  • (No Java runtime needed for Gate itself)
• A simple API to extend Gate
• Built-in rate limiter
• Automatic server icon resizing to 64x64
• Benefits from Go's awesome language features
  • simple, reliable, efficient
  • and much more

Target audiences

• advanced networks wanting performance while operating at a high scale
• simple Minecraft network admins when scripting languages are supported

What Gate does

The whole point of a Minecraft proxy is to be able to move players between servers without fully disconnecting them, like switching the world but server-wise.

Similar to the proxies Velocity (where much of the knowledge and ideas for this proxy comes from), BungeeCord, Waterfall etc. Gate delivers rich interfaces to interact with connected players on a network of Minecraft servers.

Therefore, Gate reads all packets sent between players (Minecraft client) and servers (e.g. Minecraft spigot, paper, sponge, ...), logs state changes and emits different events that custom plugins/code can react to.

Why use Gate instead of one of the Java proxies?

An always asked question: "Whats the difference between Gate and BungeeCord, for instance?"

First off, if you have all your code base in Java, 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 simpler API than known proxies like BungeeCord and Gate lets you write server code in Go <3.

Rate Limiter

Rate limiting is an important mechanism for controlling resource utilization and managing quality of service.

Defaults set should never affect legitimate operations, but rate limit aggressive behaviours.

In the quota section you can configure rate limiter to block too many connections from the same IP-block (255.255.255.xxx).

Note: The limiter only prevents attacks on a per IP block bases and cannot mitigate against distributed denial of services (DDoS), since this type of attack should be handled on a higher networking layer.

Benchmarks

Gate has already been tested to successfully handle thousands of incoming connections (even with rate limiter disabled).

TODO: PRs are always welcome... Proper benchmarks will be added when Gate is stable enough.

Quick Start

This is a simple setup of a Minecraft network using Gate proxy, a Paper 1.16.1 (server1) & Paper 1.8.8 (server2).

You will need Java Runtime 8 or higer for running the Paper servers.

1. git clone https://github.com/minekube/gate.git
2. Go to docs/sample
3. Open a terminal in this directory and download a release.
   • Or compile it yourself. ;)
4. Run Gate within docs/sample
   • (windows: gate.exe / linux: ./gate)
5. Open two more terminals, one for each server1 & server2.
   • Run java -jar <the server jar> to run both servers.

Now you can connect to the network on localhost:25565 with a Minecraft version 1.16.1 and 1.8.x. Gate tries to connect you to one of the servers as specified in the configuration.

Checkout the /server command (temporarily hardcoded until commands system has been added).

There will be an expressive documentation website for Gate later on!

Known Bugs / Limitations

Remember that Gate is in a very early stage and there are many more things planned (e.g. command system, more events, stability etc.).

• Can't login sometime in online mode.
  • Dev note: Is this due to Mojang API database latencies when replicating data for the hasJoined endpoint?

Extending Gate with custom code

• Native Go
• Script languages

Native Go

You can import Gate as a Go module and use it like a framework in your own external projects.

Go get it into your project

• go get -u go.minekube.com/gate

create a proxy.New(...), register servers and event subscribers and start proxy.Listen(...) for connections.

TODO: code examples

Script languages

To simplify and accelerate customization of Gate there will be added support for scripting languages such as Tengo and Lua.

This feature will be added when highly requested.

Anticipated future of Gate

• Gate will be a high performance & cloud native Minecraft proxy ready for massive scale in the cloud!

• Players can always join and will never be kicked if there is no available server to connect to, or the network is too full. Instead, players will be moved to an empty virtual room simulated by the proxy to queue players to wait.

• Distant future, or maybe not too far? A proxy for Java & Bedrock edition to mix and match players & servers of all kinds. (protocol translation back and forth...)