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Installing Dynmap

This page details the setup process for the Dynmap plugin, assuming the Paper Minecraft server is being used and Dynmap's internal web server is being used.

You Will Need​

  • A Minecraft server with Spigot or any of its forks
  • A secondary port allocation for the web server to listen on if you are using a shared host

Installation​

First things first, we need to install the Dynmap plugin on our server. Download it from here and upload it to /plugins on your server, whether through (S)FTP or the web. Restart your server and go to /plugins/dynmap.

Configuring Dynmap​

Once you're in the Dynmap plugin directory, we'll need to tweak the configuration.txt file a bit. Open it with your favourite text editor or web editor.

  • To adjust the resolution of tiles, find the line that says deftemplatesuffix - this'll be the first thing you see when you open up the file - change it to one of [vlowres, lowres, medres, hires]
    danger

    Fully-generated high resolution maps will take up to hundreds of gigabytes of disk space

  • To use an SQL database for map storage rather than flat files, comment type: filetree and uncomment #type: sqlite or #type: mysql along with the filename for SQLite or MySQL credentials depending on which you are using. Alternatively, you can use Amazon S3 for storing maps, uncomment the lines below # AWS S3 bucket web site and change the region and access credentials to match yours
  • To customise the title of the webpage, uncomment the line containing webpage-title and change the value as you wish.
  • To save on disk space for while preserving most quality of tile images, find the line that begins with image-format and set it to jpg-q90. Alternatively, you can use the more efficient WEBP format - make sure to also uncomment the cwebpPath and dwebpPath lines as well as installing the appropriate packages
  • To enable the outbound web server, find the line that says webserver-bindaddress and uncomment it. Change the webserver-port to whatever port you plan to use - if you're on a host with a shared IP, this'll be something way different from the default 8123. This is practically a must for this guide as it's the whole point - unless you want to use an external web server, which isn't covered here.
  • To enable login support, change login-enabled to true - change login-required to true to require login for access
  • To require login for the webchat, go back up and find the line that says webchat-requires-login - uncomment and change to true.
    note

    If you plan to use the login system, SSL is a must to encrypt traffic between users and the web server - unencrypted logins are prone to attacks from hackers. The next page contains a tutorial on how to do this

Restart your Minecraft server to apply the changes. When done, type http://<server-ip>:<dynmap-port> into your web browser - if a webpage shows up, then ta-da! Dynmap's internal web server is working fine and dandy! The next page will detail how to set up an Nginx proxy and enable HTTPS for your map.