I play Minecraft on three machines — a work PC, a home desktop, and a Thinkpad — and kept hitting the same failure: build something on one, forget to copy the save folder, overwrite it later from a two-week-old copy on another. Dropbox-style sync is the obvious fix and the wrong one; it happily corrupts a live world mid-write, region files are huge, and there’s no history once it goes wrong.

What it’s built on#

MineCommit already does the hard part: it turns a Minecraft save into something Git can diff and compress properly instead of a 60MB blob per backup, using simdnbt for NBT parsing and gitoxide for the Git I/O. I forked it to add the part I actually needed — a remote — and then kept going: a Tauri + React GUI on top of the Rust core, aimed at someone who just wants to play Minecraft, not operate a CLI.

Fetch before you play, push after. If both sides changed since the last sync, it stops and says so rather than trying to merge two different afternoons of building — there’s no sane automatic merge of two divergent worlds, and that was the whole point.

Auth, three tries in#

The GUI’s sign-in went through three designs before landing anywhere I’d hand to someone else:

1. Paste a personal access token. Works, but “generate a token and paste it into a desktop app” is a very developer thing to ask a non-technical user to do.
2. OAuth device code flow. No pasting, but OAuth apps only get offered one scope — full read/write on every repository on the account — which is a wildly bigger blast radius than a tool that touches one folder of backups needs.
3. A GitHub App. You pick exactly which repositories it can see when you install it, and it only ever gets access to those. The tradeoff is the app can no longer create the repository for you — that needs account-wide permission, the thing this change exists to avoid — so connecting a world now offers a prefilled link to create an empty repo and a link to grant the app access to it, then lists exactly what you granted.

The safety pass#

This is a backup tool; the one unforgivable bug is losing somebody’s save. Auditing every path that deletes or renames something on disk turned up a world that could be misidentified as one of MineCommit’s own throwaway copies on a name match (eligible for deletion), a symlink to a real world that could be treated the same way, and a cleanup routine that had been searching the wrong folder for two directory moves running — 9.3GB of orphaned copies on my own machine that the app had never once mentioned.

Current state#

Public releases are up to 0.13.0: upload, download, a safety audit, real world info on the dashboard (with launcher auto-detection across Prism, MultiMC, CurseForge, Modrinth, and others), and an auth flow I’m comfortable handing to someone else. Still missing a history browser and any real size analytics.

This is a fork of an upstream open-source project, kept in sync via a tracked upstream remote. Releases and issues live on the fork.

Public links#

• Repository: github.com/sharkbeans/minecommit
• Releases: github.com/sharkbeans/minecommit/releases
• Upstream: HairlessVillager/minecommit