How to administer Bravo

While Bravo is not a massively complex piece of software on its own, the plugins and features that are available in Bravo can be overwhelming and daunting. This page is a short but comprehensive overview for new administrators looking to set up and run Bravo instances.

Configuration

Bravo uses a single configuration file, bravo.ini, for all of its settings. The file is in standard INI format. Note that this is not the extended INI format of Windows 32-bit configuration settings, nor the format of PHP’s configuration files. Specifically, bravo.ini is parsed and written using Python’s ConfigParser class.

An example configuration file is provided as bravo.ini.example, and is a good starting point for new configurations.

bravo.ini should live in one of three locations:

1. /etc/bravo
2. ~/.bravo
3. The working directory

All three locations will be checked, in that order, and more-recently-loaded configurations will override configurations in previous directories. For sanity purposes, it is highly encouraged to either use /etc/bravo if running as root, or ~/.bravo if running as a normal user.

The configuration file is divided up into sections. Each section starts with a name, like [section name], and only ends when another section starts, or at the end of the file.

A note on lists

Bravo uses long lists of named plugins, and has special facilities for handling them.

If an option takes a list of choices, then the choices should be comma-separated. They may be on the same line, or multiple lines; spaces do not matter much. (As an aside, spaces matter inside plugin names, but Bravo’s plugin collection uses only underscores, not spaces, so this should not matter. If it does, bug your plugin authors to fix their code.)

Additionally, to simplify plugin naming, many plugin configuration options support wildcards. Currently, the “*” wildcard is supported. A “*” anywhere in an option list will be internally expanded to all of the available choices for that option.

The special notation “-” before a name will forcibly remove that name from a list.

Putting everything together, an example set of configurations might look like this:

some_option = first, second, third
some_newline_option = first, second,
    third, fourth
some_wildcard_option = *
some_picky_option = *, -fifth
another_picky_option = -fifth, -sixth, *
a_weird_but_valid_option = seventh, -seventh

General settings

These settings apply to all of Bravo. This section is named [bravo].

fancy_console

Whether to enable the fancy console in standalone mode. This setting will be overridden if the fancy console cannot be set up; e.g. on Win32 systems.

ampoule

Whether asynchronous chunk generators will be used. This can result in massive improvements to Bravo’s latency and responsiveness, and defaults to enabled. This setting will be overridden if Ampoule cannot be found.

World settings

These settings only apply to a specific world. Worlds are created by starting the section of the configuration with “world”; an example world section might start with [world example].

port

Which port to run on. Must be a number between 0 and 65535. Note that ports below 1024 are typically privileged and cannot be bound by non-root users.

host

The hostname to bind to. Defaults to no hostname, which is usually correct for most people. If you don’t know what this is, you don’t need it.

url

The path to the folder to use for loading and saving world data. Must be a valid URL.

serializer

Which serializer to use for saving worlds. Currently, the “anvil” serializers is provided for compatibility with modern MC clients and servers.

seed

A numeric seed to use for terrain generation. If omitted, the seed will be generated when the world is created. This option only affects new worlds; existing worlds already have a seed.

Plugin Data Files

Plugins have a standardized per-world storage. Only a few of the plugins that ship with Bravo use this storage. Each plugin has complete autonomy over its data files, but the file name varies depending on the serializer used to store the world. For example, when using the Alpha and Beta world serializers, the file name is <plugin>.dat, where <plugin> is the name of the plugin.

Bravo worlds have per-world IP ban lists. The IP ban lists are stored under the plugin name “banned_ips”, with one IP address per line.

Warps and homes are stored in hey0 CSV format, in “warps” and “homes”.