We will show you how to create a Minecraft server using easy-to-follow steps. It will be a persistent multiplayer server that you can play on with your friends from all around the world. You don’t even need to be connected to a network.
How to Make a Minecraft Server – Quick Guide
If you are in a rush and want to get straight to the point, this is our “Table Of Contents”. We recommend reading everything though.
Learn stuff (optional) Learn more stuff (optional) Requirements (required) Install and start the Minecraft server (required) Run the server even after you log out of your VPS (optional) Make the server automatically start at boot (optional) Configure your Minecraft server (required) FAQs (optional) Need specialized managed Minecraft server hosting? Host Havoc will give you a coupon to get a server.
Before going into the actual instructions, a few things you should know:
Reasons why you would NOT use a specialized Minecraft server hosting provider
Since you’re here, you’re obviously interested in hosting your own Minecraft server. There are many reasons why you wouldn’t use a specialized Minecraft server hosting provider. Here are a few.
They are usually slow. This is because multiple users share the resources. It can overload at some point. Most of them oversell their servers too. You don’t have full control over the Minecraft server or the actual server. You can’t modify anything. You’re limited. Those kinds of hosting plans are always limited in one way or another.
There are many positives to using a Minecraft host. The best thing about a Minecraft hosting provider is that you don’t have to do any of the things we’ll be discussing below. But where is the fun in that?
Why you should NOT use your personal computer to make a Minecraft server
We found many tutorials on how to host a server from your own computer. There are downsides to that.
DDoS attacks can’t be handled if your home internet isn’t secure enough. DDoS attacks can often be used to attack game servers. Your home network setup is probably not secure enough to deal with them. It is likely to not be strong enough to handle even a small attack. Port forwarding will need to be handled. If you’ve tried making a Minecraft server on your home network, you’ve surely stumbled upon port forwarding and had issues with it. You’ll need to keep your computer on at all times. Your electricity bill will soar and you’ll be adding unnecessary load to your computer. Servers are made of enterprise-grade hardware. It is designed to handle large loads with increased stability and long life. Your home internet may not be fast enough. Home networks are not designed to handle multiplayer games. To even consider setting up small servers, you’ll need to have a bigger internet plan. Data centers have several high-speed, enterprise grade internet connections. This ensures they have (or attempt to have) 100% availability. Your hardware is probably not good enough. Servers use enterprise-grade hardware, the latest and most powerful CPUs, SSDs, etc. Most likely, your personal computers does not. – Most likely, you use Windows/MacOS on the computer. Though this is debatable, we believe that Linux is much better for game hosting. Don’t worry, you don’t really need to know everything about Linux to make a Minecraft server (though it’s recommended). We’ll teach you everything you need to know.
Our tip is to not use your personal computer even though technically you can. It’s not expensive to buy a cloud server. 1 Site We’ll show you how to make a Minecraft server on cloud hosting below. It’s easy if you carefully follow the steps.
How to make a Minecraft server – Requirements
There are some prerequisites. Before you can continue to the tutorial, you should be familiar with all of these requirements.
You’ll need a Linux cloud server. Linode is our preferred choice. Their prices are cheap, services are high-quality, customer support is great, all server hardware is high-end. Check the Minecraft server requirements to find out what kind of server you should get (resources like RAM and Disk space). We recommend the $20 per month server. You can get the server for as little as $20 per month if you are only using it temporarily to play with friends. Sign up with Ubuntu 22.04. During signup, choose the closest server location to your players. Keep in mind that you’ll be responsible for your server. It’s up to you to secure it and keep it running smoothly. If you don’t want to do that, you can get a managed server, in which case the hosting provider will likely make a Minecraft server for you. To connect to the Linux cloud servers, you’ll need an SSH Client. For beginners, PuTTy is a good choice. However, we also recommend MobaXTerm. There are many SSH clients that you can choose from. You’ll need to setup your server (basic security setup at least). You can search for it online and find many tutorials. You can use Linode’s Security Guide and follow the exact steps on your Linode server. – We’ll handle the software requirements like Java below.
Finally, let’s get on to the actual business of things:
How to Make a Minecraft Server on Ubuntu (Linux)
These instructions were written and tested on Linode’s Ubuntu 22.04 server. Though they’ll also work on Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 18.04, and any other Ubuntu-based distro, and any other server provider.
We’re using the default Vanilla server from Minecraft. You can use alternatives like CraftBukkit or Spigot that allow more customizations and plugins. Though if you use too many plugins you’ll essentially ruin the server. There are pros and cons to each one. To keep things simple and easy for beginners, the instructions below will be used with the default Vanilla server. If there is interest, we might publish a tutorial for CraftBukkit very soon.
Here are the step-by-step instructions on how to make a Minecraft server:
1. Log in to your server
We’ll be using the root user. If you use a limited-user, you’ll have to execute most commands with ‘sudo’. If you’re doing something that you don’t have enough permissions, you’ll be notified.
Your SSH client allows you to log in to your server. Use your server IP and your port (most likely 22).
After you log in, ensure that you secure your server.
2. Update Ubuntu
Before doing anything else, you should first update Ubuntu. The following commands can be used to update Ubuntu:
When prompted to, hit “enter”, and/or “y”.
3. Install the required tools
This tutorial will require you to install a few packages and tools, such as text editing and making your server persistent. The following command will install them:
Some of these may be in place already.
4. Download Minecraft Server
First, create a directory where you’ll store your Minecraft server and all other files:
You can also navigate to the new directory.
Now you can download Minecraft Server. Go to the download page to find the link. Use wget to save the file.
5. Install the Minecraft server
Once you’ve downloaded the server .jar file, you need to run it once and it will generate some files, including an eula.txt license file. It will return an error the first time it is run. That’s supposed to happen. The following command should be used to get you in the door:
“-Xms2048M” is the minimum RAM that your Minecraft server can use and “-Xmx3472M” is the maximum. This can be adjusted depending upon your server’s resources. If you got the 4GB RAM server from Linode you can leave them as-is, if you don’t use the server for anything else other than Minecraft.
After that command ends and returns an error, a new eula.txt file will be generated. You will need to accept the license contained in that file. You can do this by adding “eula=true” (or the following command) to the file.
You can now start the server again and access the Minecraft server console with that same java command from before:
You must be in the /opt/minecraft directory. This directory is where you installed your MC Server.
You can leave this section if you only need it to test the system. You will need to configure your firewall if you have trouble logging in to the server.
The first time you successfully start the server it will take a bit longer to generate
We will show you how to create a command line script that you can use to start the server.
6. Start the Minecraft server with a script, make it persistent, and enable it at boot
To make things easier, we’ll create an bash script that will automatically launch the server.
First, create a bash-script with nano
A new (blank!) folder will open. Paste the following:
If you’re new to nano – you can save and close the file with “CTRL + X”, then “Y”, and hitting enter. This script navigates to your Minecraft server directory you created previously and runs the java command for starting the server. This command will make it executable.
You can then start the server at any time by using the following command:
This command will start a screen session:
Once you are in the screen session (which looks like you would start a new session of ssh), you can use the bash command from earlier to start your server.
To get out of the screen session, you should press CTRL + A-D. Even if you exit the screen session (detach), your server will still be running. You can safely log off your Ubuntu server now, and the Minecraft server you created will keep running.
Open the /etc/rc.
and add the following line above the “exit 0” line:
To access the Minecraft server console, just run the following command to attach to the screen session:
This is it for now. Congratulations and have fun! You can now connect to your Minecraft server or configure/modify it.
Configure your Ubuntu Server
You’ll, of course, need to set up your Ubuntu server and secure it if you haven’t already done so. For more information, please refer to the guide that we have provided. The configurations you need to do for your Minecraft server on your Ubuntu server are:
Enable and configure the firewall
First, if UFW has not been enabled, you will need to enable it.
You should allow the default Minecraft server port:
You should allow or deny other rules depending upon how you use your server. You should deny ports like 80 and 443 if you don’t use the server for hosting websites. You can find recommendations for UFW/Firewall guides for Ubuntu by searching Google. You should be careful when setting up your firewall. If you block the SSH port, you could lock yourself out from your server.
This port is the default port and it is often automatically scan for malware and attacked. You can prevent attacks by blocking access to anyone that’s not of your whitelist.
First, enable the whitelist mode on your server.properties. To do this, open the following file:
And change “white-list” line to “true”:
Save the file and close it.
You can then restart your server either by restarting Ubuntu or by running the start Bash script again
Access the Minecraft server console:
You can add anyone to your server’s whitelist by using the following command:
To remove them from the whitelist, use:
Exit the screen session (server console) with CTRL + A-D. It is important to note that this will block access to everyone except the whitelisted usernames.
How to Make a Minecraft Server – FAQs
We’ll answer some frequently asked questions about Minecraft Servers and our guide.
How do I restart the Minecraft server?
You can simply reboot your Ubuntu server if you have followed all the steps in our tutorial, including enabling it to start on boot. If you didn’t set it up to start at boot, you can just run the start script again which will restart the Minecraft server:
How do I configure my Minecraft server?
The server.properties files can be used for configuration. For more information, see the Minecraft Wiki. However, you can leave everything as it is and it will still work perfectly.
You can use the server console to change the difficulty, game mode, and other settings. You can access the server console by running
And execute commands there. Commands such as:
You may need the server restarted depending on the command that you used. There are many more commands that you can use. Please refer to the wiki.
How do I upgrade my Minecraft server?
If there’s a new release, you need to do this:
Navigate to the minecraft directory:
Download the latest version using wget (like step 1 in the tutorial).
Next, create and run the server.
Last, update your start code:
Update the version number as needed
You can now restart the server, and everything should work as it should.
Why is your Minecraft server tutorial so long, and yet others are only 2 lines long? !
We tried to make this beginner-friendly and be as detailed as possible. We also showed you how to make the Minecraft server persistent and start it automatically at boot, we showed you how to configure your server and everything. I mean, sure, you can start a Minecraft server with a couple of lines, but it would definitely suck, for more than one reason.
I don’t know Linux or anything you wrote about here, how do I make a Minecraft server?
Simply go through the article and copy and past the commands. If you don’t know the right way to do it, we can help. Or you can get a managed provider and have them do it.
How do I install mods on my server? How do plugins be installed?
This article is meant to be a guide. You should check the Minecraft wiki for more info, or just google it. There are many tutorials on the internet.