Install Minecraft Server

With no fuss with specific desktop environments and stuff, Installing a Minecraft Server is an easy task on the command line. The hard part is what you will build.

Make sure you have a powerful server machine above 3.7Ghz and 8G of RAM.

Install Java + Screen

For this Tutorial, We will be using openjdk and a command line window separator called screen.

Fedora / RHEL / CentOS

To install OpenJDK:

sudo yum install java-1.8.0-openjdk screen

Debian/Ubuntu

First, update your apt repo package list, then get openjdk8.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install openjdk-7-jre screen

Arch Linux

pacman -S jre8-openjdk screen

Installation and Configuration

Now let’s make a directory, because it’s about to get messy.

mkdir minecraft && cd minecraft

Now let’s get the latest version. You can update your server by stopping it, downloading the new server, and restarting it. You can download the latest version at mcversions.net There are two types of servers, snapshot and stable.

wget -O THE_URL.RANSOM.jar

Now we make a bash startup script. If it crashes, it auto restarts. Let’s name it start.sh

while :
java -Xmx1024M -Xms1024M -jar THE_URL.RANSOM.jar nogui
done

We can start the server with screen -S start.sh and exit the window with CTRL + A then push D directly after. This causes it to run in the background. We can resume it using screen -r to view the available screens, then screen -r PID to get back in.

The server will crash on the first run, so first change the eula.txt text from eula=false to eula.true and save.

Then, Re-start by stopping the server and restarting.
We can also configure the world and other settings in server.properties

For more info, see the Minecraft Wiki on this issue.

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This article was contributed by kylerschin.