Applied Over Internet

The goal of this project is to be able to see the contents of an Applied Energistics 2 (Minecraft mod) inventory through a website.

Installation instructions

Prerequisites

• Minecraft Server that you can access (you will need to modify configs)
• CC:Tweaked mod (ComputerCraft)
• Advanced Peripherical mod
• already usable AE2 setup
• Actual server to run the python webserver on (Preferably the server hosting the Minecraft server itself)
• Being able to mess around with stuff, because this tutorial isn't fool-proof

Setup

Retrieve the textures

• Install the mod https://github.com/CyclopsMC/IconExporter (https://www.curseforge.com/minecraft/mc-mods/iconexporter) and run the command /iconexporter export (in singleplayer, not on a physical server) to export the icons
• Find the output folder in your .minecraft directory, move it to the root of this cloned repository and rename it input
• Run the reorder.py <path_to_your_minecraft_folder> script, which will organise the textures in the textures folder.
• Move that textures folder to the server (hint: compress it for faster transfer)

Setup the webserver

• Create the .env file (see .env.example template) and modify the passwords
• Setup the python webserver
  • (Easiest + Stats support) Either run docker compose --profile app up
  • (Hardest + No stats support) Or run the server.py script (as a background program, with say tmux or screen) with gunicorn -b 0.0.0.0:5000 server:app (Don't use the flask default development server, for me it caused memory leaks due to creating a thread per request for some reason)
• (Optional) if you have an already existing nginx server (and/or want to go through to enable SSL), here's a virtual host template. And then do your stuff with Certbot

Setup the Minecraft server

• Modify the server CC:Tweaked configuration file to enable the HTTP API and restart your server
  • the config can be found at {world}/serverconfig/computercraft-server.toml, set enabled to true in the http section
  • if you are going to run the python webserver on your local machine/network, you also need to remove the rule that disables access to private IPs later in the file. It is the one with host = "$private". Click here for more info

In Minecraft

screenshot from the modpack ATM9

• Place your computer and your ME bridge next to the AE2 network (the ME bridge must be connected to the AE2 network)
• Import the following script in the computer as the startup.lua script (either put it through {world}/computercraft/computer/{id} or upload it on pastebin)

Requests graph

flowchart TD
    subgraph Server
        webserver[Python webserver]
        db[InfluxDB]
        subgraph Minecraft
            AE
            CC[CC:Tweaked script]
            CC -->|Requests data| AE
        end
        CC -->|Sends data| webserver
        webserver -->|Sends data| db

        grafana[Grafana]
        grafana -->|Requests data| db
    end
    user[User]
    user -->|Requests inventory HTML| webserver
    user -->|Requests stats HTML| grafana 

Loading

Legend: Arrows going from A to B (A->B) means that A sends a request to B. It sends nothing about which way the data transits, it could go from A to B or B to A

Why ?

Because