Is Dashboard for me?

Dashboard is designed for players who want an easy way of hosting a full Minecraft server right from their own computer, making it super-simple to play together with friends.

Dashboard does not manage remote servers (although the author agrees that would be awesome). Most features write directly to the server files.

Does Dashboard replace my server?

No, Dashboard does not replace any Minecraft server software! Rather, it provides a management interface for operating the server and simplifying the configuration - just like these other server 'wrappers'. Since Dashboard 'hosts' the server process on the same machine, it cannot be used to manage servers that run on a remote host.

I already have a server on my PC set up. Can I still use Dashboard?

Absolutely! Just copy the Dashboard application to your existing server folder (the one with the Minecraft_Server.jar files), and launch Dashboard from there.

• Make sure you select the correct *.jar file you were using in the 'backend settings' screen - you should see this on the first start-up

What servers work with Dashboard?

Mojang's official server, CraftBukkit, Forge and Spigot.

• Set up Dashboard with Spigot

Technical stuff

How does Dashboard actually work?

The Minecraft server process runs under the Dashboard application by the .NET process object, as inspired from Hassan Selim's blog. The stdin and stdout is redirected to the Dashboard. The frontend consists of fancy WPF XAML.

Dashboard watches for certain console line outputs to detect events such as when the server is 'ready' (startup is complete), or when players are connected or disconnected, and so on. On a side note, this method can potentially fail (e.g. an incorrect 'Online players' list) if the server outputs different log messages than expected. There is no standard spec for this, although one could write a Minecraft server plugin to pull this server data out.

This is still a 'beta'?

I know there are bugs out there. Also, there are a few issues with the code quality - after all I did write this in high school. Class inheritance would go a long way...

Open Source?

Yes! Check out the code on GitHub! This was written using Visual Basic .NET and WPF technologies.

UPnP auto-configuration?

I couldn't implement this because the .NET UPnP library I found didn't work on my own home network. Possibility due to the way my routers are configured...
However there is a MinecraftWiki article on Port Forwarding anyway :)

Will there be a OS X/Linux version?

Sorry, no. There is currently no WPF implementation other than on Windows. Porting would thus require reimplementing (and most likely redesigning) the entire gui - probably in javafx (the closest thing).