Basic Default Minecraft Server
This first tutorial won’t dive into the finer points of Minecraft server installation, but it should give you an idea of what a barebones Minecraft server looks like—kind of like your parents giving you a Tamagotchi before a puppy. If you can’t even keep the digital pet alive, how are you supposed to handle the real thing? Well, I suppose they're both digital in this case, but you get the idea.
First Things First: The Hardware
It's both the least important and the most important part of a Minecraft server.
On one hand, almost any hardware can handle a small Minecraft server (1 to 5 people). On the other hand, if it’s faulty, congratulations—you’ve just signed up for a time-consuming, skill-testing nightmare. A bad power supply? Spotty Wi-Fi or Ethernet? RAM bottlenecks or random crashes? Any of these will turn a simple setup into a troubleshooting marathon. At that point, you’ll need to know a whole lot more than just how to run a Minecraft server. That’s all to say, make sure you have a stable foundation before building the house.
Tentative Lower Requirements
Component | Minimum Requirement |
|---|---|
RAM | At least 2GB |
CPU | Anything equal to or better than a Raspberry Pi 4 (that list includes your old PC from 10 years ago, your toaster, and your smart bidet) |
GPU | No one cares. Unless you want to run LLMs (Large Language Models i.e. ChatGPT, LLaMA, DeepSeek-r1) in Minecraft—and who in their right mind would want to do that? |
USB | Not if you're clever enough to not need it.
|
HDMI | See above. |
Anything lower and—why bother?
The Operating System (OS)
Much like hardware, the operating system can make or break a Minecraft server.
An OS that's too involved—like Windows—or the more overly hand-holdy Linux distros with desktop environments, the ones meant for direct human interaction, aren’t exactly server material.
An OS that’s too barebones won’t necessarily have the tool(s) you need to install/run the server, and worse, it may not even have a repository that provides it. This, of course, brings us back to the skill and time issue we had with hardware.
Now, if you want to avoid that headache, I’d recommend going with an OS with high stability and software availability, like Ubuntu Server.
Installing Ubuntu Server
If you want to install Ubuntu Server, follow this guide.
Once that's done, we can begin in earnest.
The Server
Installing java
So for this, I'm going to assume you have at least some Bash (Linux default shell (mostly)) knowledge. That established, first, we need to make sure we can run the server.
Start by installing the Java version for the version of Minecraft you wish to host:
Refer to this table for the version.
sudo apt install openjdk-[java version nember]-jre-headlessIt's openjdk-21-jre-headless, not openjdk-[21]-jre-headless, and especially not openjdk-[java version nember]-jre-headless or whatever else you were thinking.
When that finishes installing we’re ready to install Minecraft
Installing the server
Start by creating a folder to hold your server:
mkdir minecraft-serverAnd for god's sake, click the TAB key after the first few characters of “minecraft-server”. or just copy it.
The above statement applies in perpetuity. #Tab-is-your-friend.
Change directories into the folder you just created:
cd minecraft-serverDownload the server:
wget -o server.jar https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/download/serverRun the server:
java -Xms1G -Xmx3G -jar server.jar-Xms1G Allows the server 1G minimum amount of RAM.
-Xmx3G Allows the server 3G max amount of RAM.
-jar Tells java that the following file is a jar.