Minecraft Bedrock Edition is the version of Minecraft that powers the iPhone / Android versions (formerly Minecraft Pocket Edition), the Xbox / PlayStation / Nintendo Switch editions and the free Windows 10 Minecraft edition.
Mojang has released a dedicated server which is considered to be in alpha testing. I have found it to be very stable and able to run on a wide variety of hardware.
This script and guide are written to help you get a robust Minecraft Bedrock dedicated server up and running in only a few minutes!
Features
Sets up fully operational Minecraft Bedrock edition server in a couple of minutes
Ubuntu / Debian distributions supported
Fully operational Minecraft Bedrock edition server in a couple of minutes
Sets up Minecraft as a system service with option to autostart at boot
Automatic backups when server restarts
Supports multiple instances — you can run multiple Bedrock servers on the same system
Updates automatically to the latest version when server is started
Easy control of server with start.sh, stop.sh and restart.sh scripts
Optional scheduled daily restart of server using cron
UPDATE 12/10/20 – Multiple instances are currently broken due to the Minecraft Bedrock Edition dedicated server opening up a set of ports it is not supposed to. Official bug is here on Mojang’s official website. This should fix itself eventually as it has nothing to do with this script but is in fact a bug in the server itself but for now be advised multiple instances don’t work. Single instances of the server are still fine.
I strongly recommend a Solid State drive (SSD) for your server. This is because Minecraft is constantly reading/storing chunks to the disk which makes I/O performance very important.
These are much cheaper than they used to be. Here’s a decent 120 GB one (higher options available) at a very low price:
Kingston A400 2.5″ SATA SSD
The Kingston A400 has been a great drive to use for years. It’s reliable, widely available around the world, has low power requirements and performs very well. It’s also very affordable. This drive has been benchmarked over 1000 times at storage.jamesachambers.com and is the #1 most popular SSD!
If you have a M.2 NVME slot in your motherboard you can go with a high end drive. This will give your server maximum performance even if a large number of players are running around on the server changing blocks and triggering disk writes.
This is the one I have in my machine. These range from 250 GB to 2 TB depending on how big your server might grow:
Samsung 970 EVO Plus
The Samsung 970 EVO Plus is a fantastic drive and has fallen in price substantially. It’s widely available around the world. The smaller capacities (such as the 250GB version) of this drive are perfect! This is the top performance option without going into the “Pro” series of the lineup which are much more expensive.
Almost any PC made in the last few years will be a x86_64 bit computer. If you have an older computer around that isn’t being used then it will most likely have the right CPU and amount of memory to run a basic server.
Throwing a SSD in one of these older computers will provide an excellent server experience for small and larger player counts.
Cheap SBC Option
If you don’t have an old PC laying around or want something that is more portable and uses much less power than a PC consider the Intel Compute Stick. It’s a Intel X86_64 with 1 GB of RAM for around the same price as a Raspberry Pi.
The Intel compute stick is just a little bit bigger than a USB flash drive and is powered by Micro USB. I developed this entire script and guide using one originally.
This is the highest I would go before just buying a used PC from somewhere to use. The upside of this is you are covered by manufacturers warranty and are getting brand new up to date hardware.
At the time of writing the current version is Ubuntu Server 20.04. This is a secure and robust operating system and will leave plenty of resources available for the server to run.
The script should run on any Debian based flavor of Linux but since the Minecraft Bedrock server is compiled natively for Ubuntu I recommend sticking with it. If you have a GUI flavor of Ubuntu and a decent PC (>= 2 GB of RAM) the server will work just fine on it.
Download the image and write it to a USB drive. If you are on Windows Win32DiskImager is a easy to use program to do this. Now boot the computer from the USB drive and follow the installation instructions.
Make a note of the IP address during installation or alternatively log into your home router and see what IP address the machine was assigned. You’ll need this later to connect to the server from the Minecraft client.
Note:Users have reported in the comments that Ubuntu 16.x is no longer working with the latest official Mojang binaries. Ubuntu 18.04 is the minimum requirement for the latest versions, and 20.04 is recommended!
Installation
Log into your Linux server either using SSH or a mouse and keyboard and paste/type the following command:
The script will setup the Minecraft sever and ask you some questions on how to configure it. I’ll explain here what they mean.
“Start Minecraft server at startup automatically (y/n)?” – This will set the Minecraft service to start automatically when your server boots. This is a great option to set up a Minecraft server that is always available.
“Automatically restart and backup server at 4am daily (y/n)?” – This will add a cron job to the server that reboots the server every day at 4am. This is great because every time the server restarts it backs up the server and updates to the latest version. See the “Scheduled Daily Reboots” section below for information on how to customize the time or remove the reboot.
That is it for the setup script. The server will finish configuring and start!
First Run
The server will start up and start displaying output to the console.
Once you see the “Server started” line you will be able to connect from the client.
To add the server to the client open Minecraft and click “Play”. Then at the top of the screen select the “Servers” tab and click “Add Server”.
This will ask you for a Server Name and Server IP Address. For the name you can put anything and for the server IP address put the address of your Linux server. Leave the port as the default 19132. For more information on how to let people from outside your network on go to the “Port Forwarding” section below.
Now choose the server you just added in the list and connect!
Start, Stop and Restart Server
The server can be started, stopped and restarted two different ways. You can use the provided scripts in the Minecraft folder or you can use systemctl. Here are the commands:
The server backs up each time it starts. This helps you recover easily if something goes wrong. This system works best if you configured the server to restart daily since it means you will have a backup every day.
To access these backups type:
cd ~/minecraftbe/backups ls
When a backup is made the filename will be the date and time the backup was taken. If you need to restore a backup it’s very easy. Substitute the timestamp in my example to the backup you want to roll back to. Type:
cd ~/minecraftbe
./stop.sh
rm -rf worlds
tar -xf backups/2019.02.15.22.06.30.tar.gz
./start.sh
Your world has now been restored! It’s a good idea to download these backups off the server periodically just in case the server’s storage fails.
The daily reboots are scheduled using cron. It’s very easy to customize the time your server restarts.
To change the time that the server restarts type: crontab -e
This will open a window that will ask you to select a text editor (I find nano to be the easiest) and will show the cronjobs scheduled on the server. The Minecraft one will look like the following:
0 4 * * * /home/ubuntu/minecraftbe/restart.sh
Crontab’s syntax layout
There are 5 fields here. The default restart time is set to reboot at 0 minutes of the 4th hour of the day (4 AM). The other 3 fields are left as * to represent every day of every month. Make any desired changes here and press Ctrl+X to exit nano and update the cronjob.
To remove the daily reboot simply delete the line and save.
Reconfigure / Update Scripts
The scripts can always be reconfigured and updated by downloading the latest SetupMinecraft.sh and running the installer again. It will update all of the scripts in the Minecraft directory and reinstall the startup service for you.
Running SetupMinecraft.sh again will also give you a chance to reconfigure options such as the memory dedicated to the server, daily reboots, starting the server on boot, etc.
This will not overwrite your world or any other data so it is safe to run!
Port Forwarding
If everyone on your server is on the same LAN or WiFi network as you then you don’t need to do this. If you want people to connect from outside your local network then you need to set up port forwarding on your router.
The process for this is different for every router so the best thing to do is just look at your router and find the model # and put that in google with port forwarding for easy instructions on how to do it for your specific router.
You want to forward port 19132. The type of connection is both TCP and UDP. On some routers you need to do both a TCP entry and then a second entry as UDP.
Once you do this people will be able to connect to your Minecraft server through your public IP address. This is different than your local IP which is usually a 192.x.x.x or 10.x.x.x. If you don’t know what that is just go to google and type “what’s my ip” and Google will kindly tell you!
Wired vs. Wireless
Going with an ethernet (wired) connection is going to be faster and more reliable. There’s so much wireless traffic and other interference in the air that running your server on WiFi is not recommended.
Even if it is working great 99% of the time it can ruin your experience very quickly if the WiFi drops for a couple of seconds and you get blown up by a creeper!
All that being said, the server works fine on wireless. The script will work fine as is with a wireless connection.
Conclusion
The Minecraft Bedrock Edition dedicated server runs much better than previous third party servers in the past that were missing critical features. The performance is very good even on low end hardware. It has never been easier to set up a Minecraft Bedrock server.
If you have any feedback or suggestions let me know in the comment section. A lot of the changes and developments in this script and guide are directly from readers.
518 thoughts on “Minecraft Bedrock Edition – Ubuntu Dedicated Server Guide”
Kent
Just thought I comment that the broken install/update is now fixed for me. The install and update was consistently broken on every environment that I tried (physical, kvm, lxc). I re-ran SetupMinecraft.sh yesterday and everything is working again. Thank you James and everyone.
This worked for me, but I had to do additional steps.
1) run the SetupMinecraft.sh script to update for good measure. 2) sudo chmod 755 /user/server/bedrock_server 3) sudo systemctl edit –full server.service a) edit out the user=uxername with my user 4) sudo systemctl start server.service
Server is up and running, thanks James and ALTELMA.
Sorry – I am totally new to this stuff… I managed 1..! I managed 2 but had to change the file path .. sudo chmod 755 minecraftbe is that right? but i got stuck at 3… Invalid unit name “–full” escaped as “\xe2\x80\x93full” (maybe you should use systemd-escape?). No files found for \xe2\x80\x93full.service. Run ‘systemctl edit –force –full \xe2\x80\x93full.service’ to create a new unit.
Thank you Alex! This was very helpful because my server was not working anymore since last night update. Lets hope the next update is not overwriting this fix.
I updated the scripts today to fix these issues. If you are seeing userxname in the systemd service that means you are reusing the old SetupMinecraft.sh script. You need to delete that version and download it from scratch. If you’re getting userxname it’s the old version that didn’t put the username into the service!
Just thought I comment that the broken install/update is now fixed for me.
The install and update was consistently broken on every environment that I tried (physical, kvm, lxc). I re-ran SetupMinecraft.sh yesterday and everything is working again. Thank you James and everyone.
Hey Kent,
Perfect! I am not sure why this update triggered all these issues all at once but I ended up fixing several. Thanks for letting us know!
Hello, thank you very much for this great guide.
I have been using my server for several months, but now it does not work.
When I try to start the server: chown: invalid user: “userxname”
Can you help me? Thanks a lot
Hey Leo,
Go ahead and remove SetupMinecraft.sh and download the latest version from the GitHub site and give it a try!
If someone still facing the issue server not running with version 16.220.xx.xx
Go to your server and change permission for bedrock_server with 755
Let’s compare with folder from the previous version.
This worked for me, but I had to do additional steps.
1) run the SetupMinecraft.sh script to update for good measure.
2) sudo chmod 755 /user/server/bedrock_server
3) sudo systemctl edit –full server.service
a) edit out the user=uxername with my user
4) sudo systemctl start server.service
Server is up and running, thanks James and ALTELMA.
Sorry – I am totally new to this stuff…
I managed 1..!
I managed 2 but had to change the file path .. sudo chmod 755 minecraftbe is that right?
but i got stuck at 3…
Invalid unit name “–full” escaped as “\xe2\x80\x93full” (maybe you should use systemd-escape?).
No files found for \xe2\x80\x93full.service.
Run ‘systemctl edit –force –full \xe2\x80\x93full.service’ to create a new unit.
Any idea what it is i’m doing wrong?
Thanks
Mat
Yes, I have the same problem.
Can You explain it step by step? There are people who do not know anything about linux. :p Sorry!
Thanks a lot!
Thank you Alex! This was very helpful because my server was not working anymore since last night update.
Lets hope the next update is not overwriting this fix.
running 20.04 and your script (so fast to set it up) and had minecraft BE setup in under 20 mins including OS install.
next morning – after rebooting, running script manually, restarting the setup script, all come to nought.
i get the message
chown: invalid user: ‘username’
any suggestions?
Look at my message above. I believe your service might have uxername in the service file.
https://jamesachambers.com/minecraft-bedrock-edition-ubuntu-dedicated-server-guide/comment-page-11/#comment-10284
After an hour of troubleshooting, I am going to bed.
Good luck.
Hey Alex,
I updated the scripts today to fix these issues. If you are seeing userxname in the systemd service that means you are reusing the old SetupMinecraft.sh script. You need to delete that version and download it from scratch. If you’re getting userxname it’s the old version that didn’t put the username into the service!
I had the same exact issue. Commenting the username out didn’t seem to help, but running chmod +x bedrock_server got me going. YMMV.
Good luck!