InlineMC

InlineMC is a minimal tool for launching Minecraft without the official Mojang launcher. It consists of shell scripts (for Linux, macOS, and Windows) that download the game files Minecraft needs, place them in the same folder the official launcher uses, and then start the game directly. You supply a username and a Minecraft version, and the script handles the rest.

The project has two parts. The first is the launch scripts themselves, which are plain script files you can run on any system that has Java and curl installed. They ask you which version of Minecraft to launch, download the required files from Mojang's servers if they are not already present, and start the client. You can also pipe the script directly from the internet as a one-liner without downloading anything first.

The second part is a small server called the resolver, which reads Mojang's version metadata and produces a plan file describing what to download and how to launch a given version. The launch scripts fetch this plan from a hosted URL by default, but you can run the resolver locally during development. The resolver is a Node.js server that logs every plan request and keeps running counters of which Minecraft versions have been launched, stored in a JSON file on disk.

Game files are saved in the standard Minecraft home directory that the official launcher also uses, so InlineMC does not create a separate installation. The tool is primarily aimed at situations where you want to launch Minecraft from a script or a non-standard environment without installing the full launcher application. Java must already be installed separately.