Understanding Lifecycle Strategies

Your proxies and servers lifecycles are described by Shulker but are actually managed by Agones.

You may want to customize the lifecycle of your servers so Agones does not disturb your players at innapropriate times.

EXAMPLE

For instance, you may not want Agones to update your fleet of servers because you upgraded a plugin while some players are in a mini-game.

While Shulker's server agent marks your server as Ready when the agent is fully loaded, you may want to also mark your server as Allocated when an interrupted game session is needed (a mini-game for instance).

Shulker allows you to choose a Lifecycle Strategy that will change the automatic behaviors of Agones. It can be changed on the MinecraftServer and MinecraftServerFleet:

apiVersion: shulkermc.io/v1alpha1
kind: MinecraftServerFleet
metadata:
  name: dropper-game
spec:
  clusterRef:
    name: getting-started
  replicas: 1
  template:
    spec:
      clusterRef:
        name: getting-started
      tags:
        - lobby
      version:
        channel: Paper
        name: '1.20.4'
      config:  
        lifecycleStrategy: AllocateWhenNotEmpty // [!code focus]

AllocateWhenNotEmpty strategy

With this strategy, Shulker's server agent will mark your server as Allocated when at lease one player is connected on the server.

This will disable any automatic reschedule of Agones that may be due to a plugin upgrade. For your server to be updated, you'll have to either:

1. Have all the players disconnected for the server is set back to Ready
2. Shutdown yourself the server (with the /server command for instance)

INFO

Shulker will still mark your server as Ready once the agent is fully loaded.

Manual strategy

With this strategy, no extra work is done apart marking the server as Ready after loading. It is up to you and custom implementation to manage the lifecycle of your server.

WARNING

Using this strategy with no custom implementation will keep the Ready state forever. Thus, Agones will always think that the server is not used and it may be recreated at any time for any reason.