Minecraft¶

Installing Requirements¶

The following installs a vanilla Minecraft server, if you're looking for a modded server you'll have to look up Forge or CraftBukkit guides. Minecraft as we know requires Oracle Java in order to run. Ubuntu does not come with Java installed nor is it available on the default package repos, so we'll need to add a PPA repo and install it from there, just do the following:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:webupd8team/java
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install oracle-java8-installer

Installation¶

After installing Oracle Java, we're ready to install a Minecraft server. We'll change to our steam user since it's dedicated to our game servers. We'll also create a folder specifically for it.

sudo -iu steam
cd ~
mkdir minecraft && cd minecraft

Head over to the official Minecraft website to download the newest Minecraft server executable and start it up (the example below may be outdated).

wget https://launcher.mojang.com/mc/game/1.13/server/d0caafb8438ebd206f99930cfaecfa6c9a13dca0/server.jar
java -Xms2G -Xmx2G -jar server.jar nogui

If everything went well, the server closed itself and a little eula.txt file was generated in the server's directory. We need to edit that file to accept the EULA agreement.

nano eula.txt

Change the last line to:

eula=true

Now fire up the server again and stop it once it finishes loading up.

java -Xms2G -Xmx2G -jar server.jar nogui
stop

Configuration¶

Now that all the required files have been generated, we can continue to set up our server's configuration.

nano server.properties

All the settings here are pretty much self explanatory but there's one that I'm going to address and it's online-mode. This setting tells the Minecraft server whether it should connect to the Minecraft.net servers to check if all the users connecting have a Minecraft Premium account and download their respective skins. This option is generally set to true, but if we have friends that do not have Minecraft Premium they'll be able to join our server if we set online-mode=false, keep in mind that everyone's skins will be set to default and anyone that joins through a 3rd-party launcher may be able to change their name anytime (risking identity theft or ban avoidance).

Remember, we need to allow connections through the firewall (you may need to change to an user that has access to the sudo command, i.e you main administrator user):

sudo ufw allow 25565/tcp

We'll now create a script to run the server a lot easier. Create a file running:

nano start.sh

Paste the following:

#!/bin/bash
java -Xms2G -Xmx2G -jar server.jar nogui

Make it executable:

chmod +x start.sh

Running the Server¶

You can now start the server just by running the start script.

./start.sh