Add a VERSION: IGNORE option

[green-bailey]

I notice we can set VERSION to LATEST, PREVIEW, PREVIOUS, or specific version numbers.
d2997b9

I prefer to manage my own BDS upgrades, and suggest adding an IGNORE tag to the version options.

[itzg]

That seems like a good idea for self managed upgrades.

I'm curious what benefit you're getting out of using the image id not the automatic upgrade support?

[green-bailey]

Fair question... short answer is that I like to control the timing of the updates because I'm attempting to keep the boot time from zero as fast as possible. I'd still use automatic upgrades if I can toggle when to trigger them, with something like an IGNORE flag.

I run a lobby server that is always on but uses minimal resources. That gives players a place to join.
That lobby has an NPC-triggered pop-up menu where players can choose which world they want to join, from a list of a few dozen. (I use EndstoneMC for the lobby world, to provide plug-in support for my menu).

Most of the worlds are in an offline state until they're called from the menu. If an offline world is requested from the menu, it launches a server and loads the world, and once the world is ready the player will be transferred from the lobby to the requested world.

This saves me a ton of hosting costs because the servers are on-demand (they auto-close after 15 mins of no players), and only the minimal lobby stays alive.

But I need to hack every second off of my startup times or people get bored waiting too long in the lobby.

This is all done on AWS and my containerized docker data for all of the worlds sits on a shared EFS.
I can script and run BDS updates in the background when world servers are down, but I really like the ITZG image because it helps me manage all of the variables that I'd otherwise have to manage in server.properties and elsewhere.

The IGNORE option would let me skip the upgrades on launch if a player requested the launch from the lobby, but I could override the IGNORE if I launch the world programmatically for maintenance.

I tinker for fun. I've already come up with a workaround so don't stress it. But it would be a low lift addition. Thanks for all you've created and shared!

[itzg]

Great information! With that I also understand better what you mean with the feature request. That totally makes sense to me now.

The only small quirk I would have to research is how it can identify what was the currently downloaded version and just run it.

[itzg]

...I feel like the version identifier of "existing" or "skip" might also work. Something about "ignore" wasn't clicking for me at first. Thoughts on those?

[green-bailey]

Ahh, I understand the dilemma... and I guess it should include a clear fallback methodology if no BDS exists (such as on a first boot), because in that case IGNORE or SKIP would end up failing to launch.

Maybe EXISTING is the best tag.

For identifying the currently downloaded version, it seems like you already have that logic in place, since you're already comparing that to the available version to decide if the available LATEST is newer or not?

For my workaround that I put in place, it seemed like you were scraping the number in the filename of the binary (bedrock_server-#.#.#.#). If I left that file as 'bedrock_server' it tried to download a new version on every launch regardless of what I set as the VERSION. So my workaround was to name the binary bedrock_server-1.1.1.1 and set the VERSION in ITZG as 1.1.1.1. That was enough to trick it into not touching my current install.

[itzg]

The latest image now supports "EXISTING" as a new VERSION value.