Lately I’ve been playing Mindustry a factory based tower defense game that lets you build a factory, construct defenses and grow over time. Mindustry also includes its own self-hostable server. We’re going to be taking a look at how we can use that self-hosted server file in order to create a reproducible containerized environment where we can run Mindustry games to play with friends.

To setup our Mindustry container image we’re going to create a Dockerfile with three layers:

1
2
3

FROM openjdk:25-slim
COPY server.jar /server.jar
CMD [ "java", "-jar", "/server.jar" ]

• FROM: defines which image to base our own image upon. We’ll be layering upon a slimmed down version of openjdk’s images.
• COPY: copies a file from our local machine - server.jar in this case - onto the container image so we can access it.
• CMD: defines the command to run to boot our server when we run it. For us this means using the packaged jre to run the server.jar we copied over into the container.

We build our Docker Image using this command:

1

docker build --tag "mindustry-server" .

And then run that image using docker run:

1

docker run -it -p 6567:6567 -p 6567:6567/udp mindustry-server

Mindustry Server Hosting is documented on the Mindustry Wiki here: https://mindustrygame.github.io/wiki/servers/

We are basing our Dockerfile on the openjdk images. You can find them on Docker Hub here: https://hub.docker.com/_/openjdk

If you’d like to see how we can apply similar ideas to hosting our own Minecraft Server, you can check out our containerized Minecraft server here: https://youtu.be/JtKIpGjtLzw

The current version of this container is available on GitHub at https://github.com/WorldOfZero/mindustry-server

Mindustry is available on Itch or Steam for desktop players or you can get a copy for your mobile phones:

• Itch.io: https://anuke.itch.io/mindustry
• Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1127400/Mindustry/
• Google Play Store (Android): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=io.anuke.mindustry&pli=1
• Apple App Store (iOS): https://apps.apple.com/us/app/mindustry/id1385258906?ls=1

(I don’t have any association with this game, I just like playing it)