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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. This guide aims to provide you with a solid foundation that you can build upon, whether by following future sections of this guide or exploring on your own.

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.foundation.

Tentative Lower Requirements

Component Requirement
CPU Anything equal to or better than a raspberry pi 4 or your old PC from 10 years ago.
GPU Needed*
RAM 3GB or more

Anything lower and—your experience will suffer?suffer.

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-headless

e.g. If your version of Minecraft runs on java **21**21 you would install: openjdk-21-jre-headless 

When that finishes installing we’re ready to install Minecraft

Installing the server

Start by creating a folder to hold your server:

mkdir minecraft-server

And 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-server

Download the server:

wget -o server.jar https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/download/server

Run 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.

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