Luanti-Web: A dynamic website-toolkit

Welcome to the Luanti Web Generator! Born from a passion for creative sandbox gaming, this hobby project provides a powerful, automated toolkit for generating a beautiful and feature-rich static website for your Minetest or Luanti server. Showcase your server, worlds, track your players, and inform your community.

This system is designed from the ground up to be modular, easily configurable, and perfect for small communities who want web presence without the hassle.

✨ Features

• Automated Map Generation: Leverages minetestmapper to create high-resolution PNG maps of your game worlds.
• Performant Image Processing: Uses vips, a high-performance and memory-efficient library, to scale even huge maps (tested up to 64k x 64k pixels) for the web.
• Tiled Map Generation: Uses gdal2tiles.py to create performant, zoomable map tiles for a smooth user experience.
• Dynamic Map Viewer: Implements an interactive map viewer using OpenLayers, powered by the generated map tiles, including digital zoom beyond the highest resolution.
• Live Player Tracking: Dynamically fetches and displays player locations as markers on the live map, including custom-styled popups and permanent name labels.
• Map Archive: Automatically saves a daily snapshot of the map and makes it available through a toggle on the world detail page.
• Template-Driven Site Generation: Builds all static HTML pages from simple, customizable templates.
• Flexible Configuration: Configuration is easy with a central global config and a web.conf-file for every of your worlds.
• Automation-Ready: Designed for unattended execution via scheduling tools like cron.

🔧 Prerequisites

To run this system, the following software packages must be installed on your server:

• bash: The scripting language used for the entire project.
• vips: A high-performance image processing library that replaces convert (ImageMagick).
  • Debian/Ubuntu Install: sudo apt-get install libvips-tools
• ImageMagick: Currently still required for the identify command (to read image dimensions).
  • Debian/Ubuntu Install: sudo apt-get install imagemagick
• GDAL/OGR: Provides the gdal2tiles.py script for tile generation.
  • Debian/Ubuntu Install: sudo apt-get install gdal-bin python3-gdal
• SQLite3: The command-line tool for reading SQLite databases, required by sync_players.sh.
  • Debian/Ubuntu Install: sudo apt-get install sqlite3
• bc: The "basic calculator" command-line tool, required for calculations in sync_players.sh.
  • Debian/Ubuntu Install: sudo apt-get install bc
• minetestmapper: The executable used to render maps from world data. Must be placed within the project directory.
• iproute2: Provides the ss command for check_server_status.sh (usually pre-installed on most systems).
• Web Server: A web server like Nginx or Apache is needed to serve the generated static files.

An included script (check_dependencies.sh) can automatically verify all important dependencies.

⚙️ Installation & Setup

1. Project Files

Download the latest build from the Releases-Page and extract it to a base directory on your server, such as /opt/luweb/.

OR

Clone the Git repository to a base directory.

git clone https://git.geigernet.eu/rainer/luanti-web.git /opt/luweb
cd /opt/luweb
# Make all scripts executable
chmod +x generate_map.sh generate_site.sh check_server_status.sh check_dependencies.sh sync_players.sh

2. Global Configuration

The main configuration file is config.sh. You must edit this file to match your server's environment.

Key variables in config.sh:

• BASE_SCRIPT_DIR: The root directory of the project (e.g., /opt/luweb).
• MINETESTMAPPER_WORLD_DATA_BASE_PATH: The path to your Minetest/Luanti worlds' data directory.
• WEB_ROOT_PATH: The document root of your website where the generated files will be placed (e.g., /var/www/your-domain.com/web).
• LOG_DIR_BASE: The directory where log files will be written (e.g., /var/log/luweb).

3. Per-World Configuration

The system is designed so that only worlds with a web.conf file will be displayed in the web frontend. This gives you full control over which worlds are publicly visible.

To add a world, copy the template site_generator/examples/web.conf.template into the data directory of the respective world (e.g., <server-path>/worlds/my_world/web.conf) and adjust the values.

📂 Directory Structure

The system now uses a modular structure to improve maintainability:

/opt/luweb/
├── config.sh
├── generate_map.sh
├── generate_site.sh
├── check_server_status.sh
├── check_dependencies.sh
├── sync_players.sh
├── minetestmapper (executable)
├── site_generator/
│   ├── functions/
│   │   ├── 01_utils.sh
│   │   ├── 02_init.sh
│   │   ├── 03_html_helpers.sh
│   │   └── generators/
│   │       ├── css_generator.sh
│   │       ├── main_orchestrator.sh
│   │       ├── static_pages_generator.sh
│   │       ├── world_detail_generator.sh
│   │       └── world_overview_generator.sh
│   ├── templates/
│   │   ├── world_detail_page.template
│   │   └── ...
│   └── examples/
│       └── web.conf.template
├── web_content/
│   ├── images/
│   └── static/
└── worldmaps_output/
    └── <world_name>/
        ├── map.png
        └── map_info.txt

🚀 Usage

1. Map Generation

./generate_map.sh <world_key>

2. Website Generation

./generate_site.sh

3. Status & Player Sync

./check_server_status.sh
./sync_players.sh <world_key>

4. Automation (Cronjob)

Example for crontab -e:

# Update player data every minute
* * * * * /opt/luweb/sync_players.sh world >> /var/log/luweb/cron.log 2>&1

# Check server online status every 5 minutes
*/5 * * * * /opt/luweb/check_server_status.sh >> /var/log/luweb/cron.log 2>&1

# Generate map and tiles once per hour
0 * * * * /opt/luweb/generate_map.sh world >> /var/log/luweb/cron.log 2>&1

# Re-build the static site twice a day
30 */12 * * * /opt/luweb/generate_site.sh >> /var/log/luweb/cron.log 2>&1

📄 License

MIT License Copyright (c) 2025 Rage87 - rage87@geigernet.eu

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

👤 Autoren

• Rage87 (Main-Developer)