This is a Heroku Buildpack for running a Minecraft server in a dyno. This fork removes the Amazon S3 requirement for those who don't need persistent storage. Because of this, Heroku will automatically revert all files generated at runtime. This means that after all server connections are closed, it will be as if all files had just been uploaded to Heroku. Make any permanent changes to the server locally.

Create a free ngrok account and copy your Auth token. Then create a new Git project with a eula.txt file:

$ echo 'eula=true' > eula.txt
$ git init
$ git add eula.txt
$ git commit -m "first commit"

Then, install the Heroku toolbelt. Create a Heroku app, set your ngrok token, and push:

$ heroku create --buildpack https://github.com/Gerzer/heroku-buildpack-minecraft
$ heroku config:set NGROK_API_TOKEN="xxxxx"
$ git push heroku master

Finally, open the app:

$ heroku open

This will display the ngrok logs, which will contain the name of the server (really it's a proxy, but whatever):

[03/11/15 02:06:21] [INFO] [client] Tunnel established at tcp://ngrok.com:45010

Copy the ngrok.com:45010 part, and paste it into your local Minecraft app as the server name.

You can customize ngrok by setting the NGROK_OPTS config variable. For example:

$ heroku config:set NGROK_OPTS="-subdomain=my-subdomain"

You can choose the Minecraft version by setting the MINECRAFT_VERSION like so:

$ heroku config:set MINECRAFT_VERSION="1.8.3"

You can also configure the server properties by creating a server.properties file in your project and adding it to Git. This is how you would set things like Creative mode and Hardcore difficulty. The various options available are described on the Minecraft Wiki.

You can add files such as banned-players.json, banned-ips.json, ops.json, whitelist.json to your Git repository and the Minecraft server will pick them up.