Minecraft Plugins
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Advanced Plugin Management: CI/CD for Minecraft Plugins

Duckiez
System Administrator
Expert Guide: This comprehensive tutorial includes professional techniques and best practices used by system administrators worldwide.
Tutorial Minecraft Plugins Expert Guide Professional

Introduction
Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD) isn’t just for web apps—automate your plugin testing, builds, and releases to ensure rock-solid stability. In this guide, we’ll integrate GitHub Actions with your Huthost Pterodactyl server, auto-deploy plugin JARs, and run smoke tests before pushing live.

Table of Contents

  1. Why CI/CD for Plugins?

  2. Setting Up GitHub Actions Workflow

  3. Building & Testing Plugins Automatically

  4. Deploying to Pterodactyl via API

  5. Smoke Tests & Rollback Plan

  6. Security & Access Management

  7. SEO Tips: DevOps Keywords

  8. FAQ

1. Why CI/CD for Plugins?

  • Consistency: Always deploy a tested build.

  • Speed: Ship hotfixes within minutes of a commit.

  • Quality: Automated tests catch errors before they hit production.

2. GitHub Actions Workflow

yaml
name: CI/CD Plugin on: push: branches: [ main ] jobs: build: runs-on: ubuntu-latest steps: - uses: actions/checkout@v3 - name: Set up JDK 17 uses: actions/setup-java@v3 with: java-version: '17' - name: Build with Gradle run: ./gradlew build - name: Archive JAR uses: actions/upload-artifact@v3 with: name: plugin-jar path: build/libs/*.jar

3. Automated Testing

  • Unit Tests: JUnit + Mockito for logic modules.

  • Integration Tests: Spigot test harness or MockBukkit.

  • Thresholds: Fail build if coverage < 80%.

4. Deploying via Pterodactyl API

yaml
- name: Deploy to Huthost run: | curl -X POST https://panel.huthost.net/api/client/servers/$SERVER_ID/files/write \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $TOKEN" \ -d '{"file":"plugins/MyPlugin.jar","content":"'$(base64 build/libs/MyPlugin.jar)'"}'

  • Secret Management: Store $TOKEN in GitHub Secrets.

5. Smoke Tests & Rollback

  • Smoke Tests: On deploy, spin up a staging instance and load test with mcperf.

  • Rollback: Automate reversion to previous JAR on failure detection.

6. Security & Access

  • Least Privilege: CI token only has File.write and Server.start scopes.

  • Audit Logs: Enable in Pterodactyl to track CI deployments.

7. SEO Tips

  • Keywords: “Minecraft plugin CI/CD,” “GitHub Actions Spigot.”

  • Rich Snippets: Provide code sample markup for snippet eligibility.

FAQ

Q1: Can I test plugins on Bedrock?
A: Not directly—use GeyserMC and a Java test harness for integration.

Q2: How do I handle database migrations in plugins?
A: Integrate Flyway or Liquibase and run migrations during startup in your smoke tests.

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