Personal Minecraft Server

Light on System Requirements, Put my server to work.

Personal Minecraft Server

My Minecraft Server

My Virtual Private Server (VPS) is in a datacenter in Chicago. It has a faster internet connection with lower latency than what I have access to locally. I host many websites, all running on one server with Cloudflare handling most of the traffic.

Downloading the Server

This is for version 1.21.124.2, you can get the latest version here

Microsoft has changed the download URL recently, so the curl command requires a custom User-Agent String to download the file.

curl -v -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" https://www.minecraft.net/bedrockdedicatedserver/bin-linux/bedrock-server-1.21.124.2.zip --output bedrock_server.zip

Unzip the archive into a directory

unzip bedrock_server.zip -d bedrock_server

Configuring the Server

edit the server properties using your editor of choice

cd ./bedrock_server
nano server.properties

these are the settings I used for my instance

server-name=Merlin
gamemode=survival
difficulty=normal
max-players=10
online-mode=true
allow-list=true
server-port=19132

Limiting access

I limit user access by using a whitelist of allowed users. Limiting the bandwidth usage to friends and family keeps costs down and keeps out any trouble makers.

You can lookup the user id associated to a GamerTag here. Enter the GamerTag in allowlist.json

nano allowlist.json

Valid entries follow this format

[
  {
    "name": "XboxGamerTag",
    "xuid": "a_valid_player_id"
  },
  ...entries
]

Running the minecraft server

in your terminal just run the following command

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=. ./bedrock_server

Updating Minecraft to the latest version

backup the server.properties and allowlist.json located in the /bedrock_server directory

cp server.properties allowlist.json ../backup

New website url blocks curl requests so we need to change the user agent string

curl -v -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/109.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" https://www.minecraft.net/bedrockdedicatedserver/bin-linux/bedrock-server-1.21.113.1.zip

Joining My Server

If you would like to play on this server, send me a message using the contact form at the bottom of this page. I just need your Microsoft / Xbox GamerTag and I’ll add you to the whitelist of allowed players.

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