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Installing

Horizon is simple to install and get running. You can download Horizon from our website, https://canvasmc.io, and from there it is as simple as dropping the downloaded JAR file into the same directory as your server JAR. DO NOT REPLACE THE SERVER JAR!! Horizon works as an external wrapper for the server JAR, so the server JAR needs to be present for Horizon to function correctly. The default file Horizon will search for is server.jar, which is configurable wth the horizon.yml configuration file:

pluginsDirectory: plugins
serverJar: server.jar
cacheLocation: cache/horizon
extraPlugins: [ ]
serverName: horizon

This horizon.yml file is intended for more extensive configuration of Horizon, allowing setting the server JAR name, since not all servers will have their server JAR named server.jar, or you can then have multiple server JARs and swap between the target Horizons they use.

  • The cacheLocation is simply for storing JIJ plugins and such, and is cleared on each boot of Horizon. We don’t recommend changing it, but you can if there are conflicts or some issue arises, and you need to change the location.
  • The option extraPlugins allows for adding additional plugins to the Horizon classpath to be loaded. Horizon also reads from the --add-plugin JVM argument that is passed to the server
  • The serverName option is an optional override for the server mod name, as it gets overridden in Horizon automatically by its internal mixin inject
  • The pluginsDirectory option should always point to your plugins directory for both Paper plugins and Horizon plugins; however, you can separate them if you need or want to.

Once all options are configured to your liking, you can boot the Horizon JAR as usual, and your server will run with Horizon as its bootstrapper!