Plan, AKA Player Analytics, can be downloaded from SpigotMC. It gives you a little bit of information here on how the plugin exactly works and what the web page looks like, which is pretty impressive. But we just want to install it, so let’s click on download now and then drag the download the plugin into the plugins folder of your Minecraft server. Give your server a little restart, and now it’s time to actually do the setup.
What is very important for this setup is that you need a second port available on your Minecraft server. I’m hosting my Minecraft server at Alienhost, and on Alienhost, when you go to the tab that’s called network, you will be able to create a second allocation. In other words, you will open up a second port. My main port that I need to use to join my Minecraft server is 25566, but by clicking on create allocation, I will now also have access to the port 25595. Now this is very, very important. You do need a second port, which is not your primary port, to access that web analytics page.
Now a lot of hosting providers out there do have an option like this available, so before setting all of this up, make sure to check at your hosting provider if you are able to add additional allocations.
Now in my case, this will be my second port, so I’m gonna copy it, then I’m going to my Minecraft server directory, and then we’re gonna look for the config.yml. Now inside of the config, we wanna scroll down a little bit all the way until we see the tab web server. Now under web server, there will be a ports, and these ports, which by default is 8804, you want to replace with your second additional port. So for me, that is 25595.
Now what I’m gonna do next is I’m gonna enable alternative IP, so I’m gonna set this to true, and then where it says your domain here, you just wanna put in the IP address of your Minecraft server. So for me, that is this. This part %port% will automatically be replaced with this, so as long as your additional port is stated over here, you should be fine.
Now I found that if I now just restart the server and I try to get on to the website, it doesn’t work yet. First, you have to delete this file ServerInfoFile.yml, so simply delete it, there we go. Then that file should now be regenerated with the right information, so now we’re simply gonna restart.
During the startup, you should see something like this: web server running on PORT 25595 for whatever port you put in. So here I can see my IP address, my port, and it’s actually a link that I can click on. So you can simply click on it or copy it, and there we go, we got our beautiful analytics.
Over here you can find a lot of stuff, and I’m mostly gonna leave the exploration to you, but like you can see we got uptime, total players, regular players, then also the total playtime, average playtime. In other words, there is lots of stuff here, and the more people you have on your Minecraft server, the better stats you will of course get.
Now some of you might have already noticed a little problem with this website. Literally the only thing I did was click on that link, and now I can immediately see all of these server stats. In other words, it is not very safe. Everyone that knows your server IP and the right port can access this website, and it is, of course, not something that you want. Well, maybe you do, but you probably don’t. So we need to secure it, and this is where it gets a little complicated.
To recommend the thing to do here is set up an SSL Certificate. If you do that, your website will not be accessible through HTTP, which is considered unsafe, but instead, through HTTPS, which is safe. Now if you do set up an SSL Certificate, you will be able to enable a login system, so when you’re here, you can put in a username and the password, and only after putting in the right information, you will be able to access this page.
The problem is, to add an SSL Certificate, you need terminal access. Now this video is not really about terminals or SSL Certificate or Linux, so I won’t go too much into detail, but basically they want you to…