Automatically shutting down an idle Minecraft server

Put this in /etc/cron.hourly/check_minecraft_server or maybe cron.daily depending on how much you care about paying extra server-rental charges:

#!/usr/bin/python

https://github.com/Dinnerbone/mcstatus

pip install mcstatus

from mcstatus import MinecraftServer
import os

server = MinecraftServer.lookup(“your-minecraft-server.com:12345”)

status = server.status()

if status and not status.players.online:
   print “Server is empty.”
   os.system(“shutdown now -h”)

Jun 06, 2015