Install a Minecraft Server on Fedora 26

In this tutorial, I will guide you through setting up a Minecraft server on a high-performance SSD VPS at Vultr. You will learn how to set up a Minecraft server on Fedora 26 x64.

Requirements

• Any SSH client.
• 1GB RAM VPS server with Fedora 26 x64 installed.

Preparation

First, login to your new Fedora server at Vultr and install the required software.

ssh root@ip.ip.ip.ip  

Install Java 1.8:

[root@vultr ~]# yum install java-1.8.0-openjdk  
...
Is this ok [y/N]: y

Install screen:

[root@vultr ~]# yum install screen
...
Is this ok [y/N]: y

Open the Minecraft server port (25565) in firewalld:

firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-port=25565/tcp
firewall-cmd --reload

For security reasons, let’s create a user to run your Minecraft server under. If anyone finds a vulnerability in the server, they will not be able to gain root access on your server.

adduser mcserver
# set a secure password.
passwd mcserver
# this allows you to run screen while su'd from root for the next step
chown mcserver `tty`

Configuration

Lets switch user to mcserver and install Minecraft server! Change the URL accordingly to the newest version of Minecraft.

su - mcserver
mkdir minecraft
cd minecraft
wget -O minecraft_server.jar https://s3.amazonaws.com/Minecraft.Download/versions/1.11.2/minecraft_server.1.11.2.jar
chmod +x minecraft_server.jar
screen
echo "eula=true" > eula.txt
# start your Minecraft server
java -Xmx768M -Xms768M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui

Congratulations, your Minecraft server is now up and running on a high-performance SSD VPS server!

Notes

To install on a 768MB VPS, follow the same commands above but change the last java command to:

java -Xmx512M -Xms512M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui

If you require more players (and thus more RAM) you just launch a larger instance and then simply subtract 256M from the amount of RAM your instance has allocated. For example, a 4096M instance would launch with -XmX3840M -Xms3840M.

If you want a private server, you can specify player names that are allowed to join. To do this, first, start your server:

java -Xmx768M -Xms768M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui

Wait for it to finish loading.

...
[Server thread/INFO]: Preparing spawn area: 1%
[Server thread/INFO]: Preparing spawn area: 36%
[Server thread/INFO]: Preparing spawn area: 92%
[Server thread/INFO]: Done (3.496s)! For help, type "help" or "?"

Type the following commands into the console.

whitelist on
whitelist add <username>
whitelist add <username2>
....

Enter your friend’s user name instead of <username>. You can add as many of them as you would like. After this, you will see the following output:

[Server thread/INFO]: Turned on the whitelist
[Server thread/INFO]: Added <username> to the whitelist

If you want to turn whitelist off, simply type whitelist off.