Creating a Minecraft Server on Ubuntu 18.04

Introduction

I decided to try and get a small minecraft server running on a Linux server because, why not?

So I spun up a new VM of Ubuntu 18.04 and went to work.

Installation

First update everything
apt update && apt install git build-essential

Then get Java installed, but the headless version of Java, cause, well, server
apt install openjdk-8-jre-headless

Create a new user to run the minecraft instance instead of the root
sudo useradd -r -m -U -d /opt/minecraft -s /bin/bash minecraft

switch to the minecaft user
su - minecraft

Although in my case, during the installation of the VM I created a user "minecraft" so I didn't need to manually create one.

Navigate to the /server directory and download a new server jar. I used BuildTool to create a new jar file. using wget https://hub.spigotmc.org/jenkins/job/BuildTools/lastSuccessfulBuild/artifact/target/BuildTools.jar to download the new tools and then I ran java -jar BuildTools.jar --rev 1.13.2 to get a new server build and move that into the /server directory if it isn't already.

From there run java -Xmx4G -Xms2G -d64 -jar server.jar nogui in the /server directory and then it will generate the initial files for the server.

Edit the server.properties file and change the following values
rcon.port=25575 rcon.password=strong-password enable-rcon=true

Final Notes

Now from there everything should be good to go. I ended up adding plugins to the generated plug in folder using a new sftp connection from another computer on my network. I'm still in the process of configuring those plugins and such but overall the server is up and running.

Things to still do are port forward the re correct port on my router to access the server outside of the local network.

Quick Links

Reference Install Guide
Server Jar Builder