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!
This is the standalone version. The easiest and most problem-free way to run this is using Docker (installed as simply as sudo apt install docker.io): Legendary Minecraft Bedrock Container
Sets up the official Minecraft Bedrock Server (currently in alpha testing)
Fully operational Minecraft Bedrock edition server in a couple of minutes
Ubuntu / Debian distributions supported
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 or user-defined version when server is started
Easy control of server with start.sh, stop.sh and restart.sh scripts
Adds logging with timestamps to “logs” directory
Optional scheduled daily restart of server using cron
Requirements
A computer with a 64 bit processor (if you are trying to use ARM read my article on the limitations). 32 bit binaries of the official server are not available so it needs to be 64 bit!
1 GB of RAM or higher
The only officially supported platform by Microsoft is Ubuntu 22.04 / 20.04 (current LTS, recommended)
Other Linux flavors supported by this script as well as long as they use systemd (for the service). The script assumes apt is installed but there are minimal dependencies so you could install these on another distro (that doesn’t have apt present) and use the script normally.
Recommended Gear
Game Editions
Minecraft: Bedrock Edition is the “Windows 10” version of Minecraft as well as the version of Minecraft on the Xbox / Playstation / Switch. The versions of Minecraft for Android and iOS are also the Bedrock edition.
All of these versions support cross-platform play with each other (but not with the Java edition).
Minecraft Bedrock Digital Code
This is the PC Minecraft for Windows 10 (Bedrock) edition of Minecraft. It is able to play cross-platform with other players on Android / iOS / Playstation / Xbox / Switch. Available as a code that is instantly activated to give you permanent access to the game!
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 capacity options are available) at a very low price:
Kingston A400 2.5″ SATA SSD
The Kingston A400 is 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 Pi Benchmarks and is the #1 most popular SSD among the community!
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:
The Samsung 980 Pro (NVMe) is a professional grade SSD and one of the fastest in the world. The Samsung NVMe drives have been at the top of this category for a long time and are well trusted for both their performance and reliability / long life.
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 (as well as fast storage) 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.
The speed of your storage will make the largest difference. Older HDDs are going to have significantly slower performance than any modern SSD even with all other hardware equal. This is because the Minecraft server is constantly reading/writing chunks of your world as well as updates to it to the disk so this tends to be the bottleneck.
Operating System
I highly recommend using Ubuntu Server to run the Minecraft dedicated server. It is available here.
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.
Note: People 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.
The first question will be the installation path. This is the root installation path for ALL servers you will have. If you add additional servers later you should select the exact same installation path. It should always be left as the default (~).
The only exception is if you have something like a completely dedicated disk for the Minecraft server. In that case you should always use the same root path of /mnt/yourdrive or wherever the path is for every new/additional server you install.
“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!
Version Override
You can revert to a previous version with the revert.sh script included in your directory like this:
james@jamesgigabyte-linux:~/minecraftbe/james$ ./revert.sh
Set previous version in version_pin.txt: bedrock-server-1.19.10.20.zip
If you have a specific version you would like to run you can also create version_pin.txt yourself like this:
The version hold can be removed by deleting version_pin.txt. This will allow it to update to the latest version again!
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.
Benchmarking / Testing Storage
If you’re getting poor performance you may want to run my storage benchmark with:
PC results won’t show up on the site yet (it’s meant for Raspberry Pi) but it will run on Linux just fine and give you a score. If you search for the model of your drive on Pi Benchmarks you can compare your score with others and make sure the drive is performing correctly!
Troubleshooting Note – Oracle Virtual Machines
A very common problem people have with the Oracle Virtual Machine tutorials out there that typically show you how to use a free VM is that the VM is much more difficult to configure than just about any other product / offering out there.
It is because there are several steps you need to take to open the ports on the Oracle VM. You need to both:
Set the ingress ports (TCP/UDP) in the Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) security list
*and* set the ingress ports in a Network Security Group assigned to your instance
Both of these settings are typically required before you will be able to connect to your VM instance. This is purely configuration related and has nothing to do with the script or the Minecraft server itself.
I do not recommend this platform due to the configuration difficulty but the people who have gone through the pain of configuring an Oracle VM have had good experiences with it after that point. Just keep in mind it’s going to be a rough ride through the configuration for most people.
Troubleshooting Note – Hyper-V
There is a weird bug in Hyper-V that breaks UDP connections on the Minecraft server. The fix for this is that you have to use a Generation 1 VM with the Legacy LAN network driver.
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.
1,555 thoughts on “Minecraft Bedrock Edition – Ubuntu Dedicated Server Guide”
Chris
James,
Thank you so much for your work on this! It has helped me set up a couple of servers for myself and sons. I do have one challenge that I’m not sure how to fix. All three servers are set to backup and restart at 4:00 AM as you suggested. However, one of them doesn’t restart. When I do the screen, server 2 lists 4 ports and one of them is the one of the server that is not restarting. If I stop that server and start server 1 then restart server 2, everything works fine. I have all three servers set up to use different ports, but server 2 seems to revert back to the suggested ports and uses the ones I set up. I have checked the server properties and the correct ports are listed, but again, when I check the screen all three servers list 4 ports (2 IPV 4 and 2 IPV 6).
Did you see the bold update near the top of this page? Seems to describe your issue. Sounds like a issue with the server. Unclear if there is a fix yet. Unfortunately the server has been “alpha” status for some time and bug fixes may not be a priority.
No worries, this has been going on for ages and I’m stunned they haven’t fixed it yet!
It sounds like you mostly found the “best” answer here which is that the order you start up the servers seems to matter. People have been able to get it working by utilizing this strategy to “work around” the bug by starting up servers in a certain order. They’ve done this by adding a startup delay to some of the servers to use it with the automated scripts in the past.
Sorry about that, it’s a BDS bug and is outside my control or I would definitely fix it myself!
I did find another work around, I think. I changed the port for all three servers so none of them use the default ports. This seems to have allowed all three to start up upon restart.
That’s a fantastic find, thanks for sharing! It actually makes sense, we know the problem has something to do with the default ports which is why starting them up in a different order seems to fix it. By having none of them use the default ports you avoid the issue.
I’ll definitely let other people know and put this in the documentation, thanks again!
To restart the server with a different seed you set the seed you want in the server.properties file. There’s a line that will say seed= and usually be blank or have a default populated seed you can replace with the seed you want. Once you do that go ahead and remove the “world” folder so that the map has to be regenerated (obviously have backups before you try anything crazy!).
I am attempting to utilize the /gamemode commands after the server is created and started. But when I attempt to use them ingame, it gives me the error “cheats are not enabled in this level”. Did you ever run into this issue?
I did manage to change the settings in the “server.properties” file. However, when I attempt to execute the commands in the chat box, i receive an error “unknown command”
I think I know what is happening. The commands are only available to operators/admins. Can you go into the server console by typing screen -r and then type this in the server console and press enter:
op yourusername
or op “your user name” if there’s spaces. That should unlock all these commands. The “cheat” message is misleading in that sense as what is really wrong is you don’t have operator access (at least on multiplayer). Hopefully that helps!
James, nice work on the scripts here. The installer worked great. The start, stop, restart scripts also work great. One thought, and please understand I’m still learning in Linux, so could be a user error. But I’ve noticed when checking logs that the cron jobs are not executing properly. First I noticed when a server update came down the pipe, the nightly cron restart didn’t update successfully. Manually running the script did complete the update normally. Later, I’ve paid more attention to the cron mail logs, and they say ‘Command not found’ for route specifically.
route is located on my Ubuntu 20.04 instance in /sbin/route. By default it seems cron does not load /sbin into $PATH. For me cron only has /usr/bin:/bin as $PATH.
Not sure if it is the most elegant solution, but I added:
To the top of the stop/start/restart scripts following the #!/bin/bash line. That has my daily cron jobs executing normally again. Is this an error in my Ubuntu setup? Or an oversite in using the scripts as cron jobs? I’ve read cron needs absolute paths, but it seems filling the $PATH variable fixes the issue.
Thanks for the blog write up. It helped me establish a reliable Minecraft server.
The update on April 20th should have fixed this by adding the /sbin/ to the front of the route command. It may be worth deleting your SetupMinecraft.sh file and downloading the latest one from GitHub to make sure all the scripts are updated to the latest version. For example in start.sh the line from the latest updated start.sh would look like:
which would be the old way and was definitely an oversight like you suspected. By fully qualifying the path to the route binary by actually specifying the /sbin we are eliminating the pathing issue and avoiding having to rely on the path variable.
You actually came up with a fantastic solution! You actually fixed the pathing issue in your solution by specifying the path variable yourself after the #!/bin/bash and in the new version of start.sh. You’re correct that a lot of the low level services and scripts like cron don’t load all of the environment variables that a user session would have. The new version of the script just avoids this entirely by eliminating the path search completely and manually giving a direct path to a binary so that it doesn’t matter what is loaded in the PATH variable if that makes sense!
Excellent James! You seemed to notice the issue about the same time I did. I had started to go through and modify the commands to include the full path like you showed above (/sbin/route), but I didn’t feel like making sure I caught all the absolute command paths, and had found that redefining the PATH at the start of the script took care of all of it.
Again, the scripts seem to work perfectly as expected now, so many thanks for your work & continued support. Where can I buy you a coffee/beer, beverage of your choice?
I’ve been inspired to learn a bit of scripting from this little project and am working on a server wrapper to help administrate the server from afar. Most notably a mechanical turn dial for the kids to turn to change the difficulty setting from peaceful to down right dangerous.
Thanks for the kind words! I have some crypto addresses at the bottom of the page but if you don’t have crypto then don’t sweat it at all, I still need to set up a tip jar section with some other ways.
That’s fantastic you’ve been experimenting with the scripts to learn and that is why I wrote them originally! They’re pretty simple wrappers that just make things a lot easier. I really like the idea of a mechanical turn dial for the difficulty setting!
Not sure if I’m a sign of resistance or more of the ‘norm’ but I haven’t dabbled in crypto yet. In fact, I was totally clueless to what the random character strings were at the bottom of your pages. I’ve been educated, but haven’t the desire to dabble in the invisible money arts yet. Paypal seems like a common method. (Read: That’s what I find easy to use)
I’ll send you a note if I ever turn this difficulty dial into reality.
Absolutely! For setting the world spawn it is /spawnpoint [targets] [pos]. The [targets] is if you want to change a specific player’s spawn point and the location is the X Y Z coordinates you want to set for the spawn. Example: /spawnpoint jamesachambers -7 67 45
You actually don’t need to fill in the fields in brackets to use the command though. My favorite way to use the command is to just walk to the spot you want to be the world spawn point and type /spawnpoint with nothing else.
To allow cheats on the multiplayer server you can use the server.properties file in the ~/minecraftbe/yourserver directory. If you open that file in a text editor (or on the CLI by typing nano server.properties from the minecraft server folder) you’ll see this line:
allow-cheats=false
Once you change that to true and restart your Minecraft server it should take care of it!
I also have officially started writing the guide I said I would bump up the priorities and actually have written content. All of the questions we’ve covered (as well as other people’s as well) are going to for sure be covered in the guide to help others in the future as well!
Ugh! So I did add a utility script that may be of service called fixpermissions.sh. You can find that in the server folder and run it by just typing:
sudo ./fixpermissions.sh
Also, make absolutely sure you have the latest version of all the scripts. Remove the SetupMinecraft.sh version you have and then download the latest one from GitHub as there has been some changes.
I did make it try to set the chmod +x on startup but the problem is the startup script doesn’t run as sudo/root (intentionally for security). It definitely seems to be the updates doing it.
I’ll have to investigate and see if maybe the flag isn’t being preserved when it’s decompressed or if the Minecraft team just straight up isn’t marking it as executable and expects the user to do that themselves. Give the utility script a try and let me know!
Hi James,
First and foremost, I would like to thank you for all the effort you put into this! It’s much appreciated! I do have a couple problems I would like to run by you.
1. I had my server up and running and connected from the friends screen. Then I continued to port forward and found my servers ip from the list. I used 19132 as starting pot and 19133 as ending. I also did TCP and UDP. Then googled whats my ip on my phone and used the ipv4 for the server ip on minecraft. I also used 19132 as the port. When I click join server it worked but not like I thought at first. It only works when I’m connect to my wifi at home. So I thought I should restart the server (laptop) and used sudo reboot. This leads me to the next problem.
2. Once it rebooted I logged in but the minecraft server didn’t auto start. So I typed sudo systemctl start minecraftbe. This lead to it saying systemctl wasn’t a command. So I tried to use .cd ~/minecraftbe then ./start.sh but that wasn’t a file apparently.
3. Lastly, I am writing this on my pc and when I search “whats my ip’ its different than when I searched on my phone. So I don’t know which to put in on minecraft. (would try my computers but my server is down rn bc of problem 2)
So sorry for such a lengthy comment but thanks in advance!
*Update*
when previously typing systemctl i was typing 1 not l now im getting this:
Failed to start minecraftbe.service: Unit minecraftbe.service not found.
Make sure you don’t actually use the service name “minecraftbe”. That is the name of the root folder that contains all servers so you end up with a ~/minecraftbe/minecraftbe nested folder and it can cause problems. I actually disallowed that in the latest update a few days ago which should have kept you from encountering this problem so you may want to check to make sure you have the latest version of SetupMinecraft.sh as I have fixed a lot of service related issues.
The name of your server’s service should be what you used for the server label in SetupMinecraft.sh. You can just put minecraft, test, etc. and then your service’s name will be minecraft.service or test.service, etc. Anything except for minecraftbe that is the name of a valid folder (no weird symbols).
Can you try deleting your local copy of SetupMinecraft.sh and downloading the latest one from GitHub and let me know what you’re seeing?
Hey James,
Thanks for the help! I am not very good at this so don’t know if i understood this correctly… I used “rm SetupMinecraft.sh”, then used your guide to install it again. And used my name (jrlucken) as the server name/ folder the I did “sudo systemctl stop jrlucken” and it worked. Next I restarted my server and it appears that it started automatically (tho didn’t bring up the server screen). It is the same world as before tho… Again thanks for the help. One last question: Am I supposed to use my public ip address when put in the server on minecraft or my laptop’s (server). It appears to not work at all when I use my public one and only works when connected to the same internet when I use my laptops.
Fantastic, it sounds like you’re on the right track!
For your IP question the answer is they both should work, but the reason it doesn’t work on the public IP is usually firewalls and needing to set up a port forward on your router for the Minecraft ports. Have you done the port forwarding yet? Otherwise the traffic won’t be forwarded to your server. Most firewalls will block external connections as well on the computer so check your Windows Firewall and or other security settings as well. The public IP network will be the “public” network type.
We have encountered this before actually. The package to install should be “libcurl4” but ThreadOne from this thread had to do a manual install for some reason. You may be able to force reinstall libcurl4 with a:
James,
Thank you so much for your work on this! It has helped me set up a couple of servers for myself and sons. I do have one challenge that I’m not sure how to fix. All three servers are set to backup and restart at 4:00 AM as you suggested. However, one of them doesn’t restart. When I do the screen, server 2 lists 4 ports and one of them is the one of the server that is not restarting. If I stop that server and start server 1 then restart server 2, everything works fine. I have all three servers set up to use different ports, but server 2 seems to revert back to the suggested ports and uses the ones I set up. I have checked the server properties and the correct ports are listed, but again, when I check the screen all three servers list 4 ports (2 IPV 4 and 2 IPV 6).
Thank you!
Did you see the bold update near the top of this page? Seems to describe your issue. Sounds like a issue with the server. Unclear if there is a fix yet. Unfortunately the server has been “alpha” status for some time and bug fixes may not be a priority.
Thank you! I’m sorry I missed that!
Hey Chris,
No worries, this has been going on for ages and I’m stunned they haven’t fixed it yet!
It sounds like you mostly found the “best” answer here which is that the order you start up the servers seems to matter. People have been able to get it working by utilizing this strategy to “work around” the bug by starting up servers in a certain order. They’ve done this by adding a startup delay to some of the servers to use it with the automated scripts in the past.
Sorry about that, it’s a BDS bug and is outside my control or I would definitely fix it myself!
I did find another work around, I think. I changed the port for all three servers so none of them use the default ports. This seems to have allowed all three to start up upon restart.
Hey Chris,
That’s a fantastic find, thanks for sharing! It actually makes sense, we know the problem has something to do with the default ports which is why starting them up in a different order seems to fix it. By having none of them use the default ports you avoid the issue.
I’ll definitely let other people know and put this in the documentation, thanks again!
Great write up James.
One thing I can’t figure out (and maybe I missed), how do I:
1. Change the mode of the game from Survival to Creative
2. Change any other settings
3. Restart the server with a different seed
Any help appreciated!
Hey Paul,
Absolutely! The /gamemode command will change the game mode, so you can do /gamemode creative, /gamemode survival, etc. Check out this link for a comprehensive list of commands that is fun to just look through.
To restart the server with a different seed you set the seed you want in the server.properties file. There’s a line that will say seed= and usually be blank or have a default populated seed you can replace with the seed you want. Once you do that go ahead and remove the “world” folder so that the map has to be regenerated (obviously have backups before you try anything crazy!).
Sir,
I am attempting to utilize the /gamemode commands after the server is created and started. But when I attempt to use them ingame, it gives me the error “cheats are not enabled in this level”. Did you ever run into this issue?
I did manage to change the settings in the “server.properties” file. However, when I attempt to execute the commands in the chat box, i receive an error “unknown command”
Hey Joshua,
I think I know what is happening. The commands are only available to operators/admins. Can you go into the server console by typing screen -r and then type this in the server console and press enter:
op yourusernameor op “your user name” if there’s spaces. That should unlock all these commands. The “cheat” message is misleading in that sense as what is really wrong is you don’t have operator access (at least on multiplayer). Hopefully that helps!
that was it!!!! i appreciate it. the next step is to get my JAVA game converted over. thank you so much. your script is a life saver to use
Awesome, glad it worked Joshua, no problem at all and take care!
Thanks so much. I actually found a few of these answers after I posted. I should have googled more first!
But I was initially under the impression that they were changes specific to your code when in fact they are standard Minecraft server controls.
Thanks again!
Hey Paul,
Don’t sweat it at all, I’m glad you were able to find it. Enjoy and have fun!
James, nice work on the scripts here. The installer worked great. The start, stop, restart scripts also work great. One thought, and please understand I’m still learning in Linux, so could be a user error. But I’ve noticed when checking logs that the cron jobs are not executing properly. First I noticed when a server update came down the pipe, the nightly cron restart didn’t update successfully. Manually running the script did complete the update normally. Later, I’ve paid more attention to the cron mail logs, and they say ‘Command not found’ for route specifically.
route is located on my Ubuntu 20.04 instance in /sbin/route. By default it seems cron does not load /sbin into $PATH. For me cron only has /usr/bin:/bin as $PATH.
Not sure if it is the most elegant solution, but I added:
PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
To the top of the stop/start/restart scripts following the #!/bin/bash line. That has my daily cron jobs executing normally again. Is this an error in my Ubuntu setup? Or an oversite in using the scripts as cron jobs? I’ve read cron needs absolute paths, but it seems filling the $PATH variable fixes the issue.
Thanks for the blog write up. It helped me establish a reliable Minecraft server.
Hey Phillip,
The update on April 20th should have fixed this by adding the /sbin/ to the front of the route command. It may be worth deleting your SetupMinecraft.sh file and downloading the latest one from GitHub to make sure all the scripts are updated to the latest version. For example in start.sh the line from the latest updated start.sh would look like:
DefaultRoute=$(/sbin/route -n | awk '$4 == "UG" {print $2}')instead of
DefaultRoute=$(route -n | awk '$4 == "UG" {print $2}')which would be the old way and was definitely an oversight like you suspected. By fully qualifying the path to the route binary by actually specifying the /sbin we are eliminating the pathing issue and avoiding having to rely on the path variable.
You actually came up with a fantastic solution! You actually fixed the pathing issue in your solution by specifying the path variable yourself after the #!/bin/bash and in the new version of start.sh. You’re correct that a lot of the low level services and scripts like cron don’t load all of the environment variables that a user session would have. The new version of the script just avoids this entirely by eliminating the path search completely and manually giving a direct path to a binary so that it doesn’t matter what is loaded in the PATH variable if that makes sense!
Excellent James! You seemed to notice the issue about the same time I did. I had started to go through and modify the commands to include the full path like you showed above (/sbin/route), but I didn’t feel like making sure I caught all the absolute command paths, and had found that redefining the PATH at the start of the script took care of all of it.
Again, the scripts seem to work perfectly as expected now, so many thanks for your work & continued support. Where can I buy you a coffee/beer, beverage of your choice?
I’ve been inspired to learn a bit of scripting from this little project and am working on a server wrapper to help administrate the server from afar. Most notably a mechanical turn dial for the kids to turn to change the difficulty setting from peaceful to down right dangerous.
Hey Phillip,
Thanks for the kind words! I have some crypto addresses at the bottom of the page but if you don’t have crypto then don’t sweat it at all, I still need to set up a tip jar section with some other ways.
That’s fantastic you’ve been experimenting with the scripts to learn and that is why I wrote them originally! They’re pretty simple wrappers that just make things a lot easier. I really like the idea of a mechanical turn dial for the difficulty setting!
Not sure if I’m a sign of resistance or more of the ‘norm’ but I haven’t dabbled in crypto yet. In fact, I was totally clueless to what the random character strings were at the bottom of your pages. I’ve been educated, but haven’t the desire to dabble in the invisible money arts yet. Paypal seems like a common method. (Read: That’s what I find easy to use)
I’ll send you a note if I ever turn this difficulty dial into reality.
Hey Phillip,
No worries, I do have a PayPal at my Buy a Coffee / Donate Page!
Hey James,
Sorry another question… Is there a way to allow cheats / set world spawn?
Thanks, Jacob
Hey Jacob,
Absolutely! For setting the world spawn it is /spawnpoint [targets] [pos]. The [targets] is if you want to change a specific player’s spawn point and the location is the X Y Z coordinates you want to set for the spawn. Example: /spawnpoint jamesachambers -7 67 45
You actually don’t need to fill in the fields in brackets to use the command though. My favorite way to use the command is to just walk to the spot you want to be the world spawn point and type /spawnpoint with nothing else.
To allow cheats on the multiplayer server you can use the server.properties file in the ~/minecraftbe/yourserver directory. If you open that file in a text editor (or on the CLI by typing nano server.properties from the minecraft server folder) you’ll see this line:
allow-cheats=falseOnce you change that to true and restart your Minecraft server it should take care of it!
I also have officially started writing the guide I said I would bump up the priorities and actually have written content. All of the questions we’ve covered (as well as other people’s as well) are going to for sure be covered in the guide to help others in the future as well!
Thanks!
When i start my server it crashes every time. It minimizes. I type screen -r and it saids “Thers no screen to be resumed”.
Hey Someone,
Did you check the log files or try running the server manually? From what we’ve been seeing lately I’m guessing that you may be missing a dependency!
I have the same problem and it is due to the bedrock_server binary changing to non executable. I am guessing this happens post update.
Hey Shezzski,
Ugh! So I did add a utility script that may be of service called fixpermissions.sh. You can find that in the server folder and run it by just typing:
sudo ./fixpermissions.shAlso, make absolutely sure you have the latest version of all the scripts. Remove the SetupMinecraft.sh version you have and then download the latest one from GitHub as there has been some changes.
I did make it try to set the chmod +x on startup but the problem is the startup script doesn’t run as sudo/root (intentionally for security). It definitely seems to be the updates doing it.
I’ll have to investigate and see if maybe the flag isn’t being preserved when it’s decompressed or if the Minecraft team just straight up isn’t marking it as executable and expects the user to do that themselves. Give the utility script a try and let me know!
Hi James,
First and foremost, I would like to thank you for all the effort you put into this! It’s much appreciated! I do have a couple problems I would like to run by you.
1. I had my server up and running and connected from the friends screen. Then I continued to port forward and found my servers ip from the list. I used 19132 as starting pot and 19133 as ending. I also did TCP and UDP. Then googled whats my ip on my phone and used the ipv4 for the server ip on minecraft. I also used 19132 as the port. When I click join server it worked but not like I thought at first. It only works when I’m connect to my wifi at home. So I thought I should restart the server (laptop) and used sudo reboot. This leads me to the next problem.
2. Once it rebooted I logged in but the minecraft server didn’t auto start. So I typed sudo systemctl start minecraftbe. This lead to it saying systemctl wasn’t a command. So I tried to use .cd ~/minecraftbe then ./start.sh but that wasn’t a file apparently.
3. Lastly, I am writing this on my pc and when I search “whats my ip’ its different than when I searched on my phone. So I don’t know which to put in on minecraft. (would try my computers but my server is down rn bc of problem 2)
So sorry for such a lengthy comment but thanks in advance!
*Update*
when previously typing systemctl i was typing 1 not l now im getting this:
Failed to start minecraftbe.service: Unit minecraftbe.service not found.
Hey Jacob,
Make sure you don’t actually use the service name “minecraftbe”. That is the name of the root folder that contains all servers so you end up with a ~/minecraftbe/minecraftbe nested folder and it can cause problems. I actually disallowed that in the latest update a few days ago which should have kept you from encountering this problem so you may want to check to make sure you have the latest version of SetupMinecraft.sh as I have fixed a lot of service related issues.
The name of your server’s service should be what you used for the server label in SetupMinecraft.sh. You can just put minecraft, test, etc. and then your service’s name will be minecraft.service or test.service, etc. Anything except for minecraftbe that is the name of a valid folder (no weird symbols).
Can you try deleting your local copy of SetupMinecraft.sh and downloading the latest one from GitHub and let me know what you’re seeing?
Hey James,
Thanks for the help! I am not very good at this so don’t know if i understood this correctly… I used “rm SetupMinecraft.sh”, then used your guide to install it again. And used my name (jrlucken) as the server name/ folder the I did “sudo systemctl stop jrlucken” and it worked. Next I restarted my server and it appears that it started automatically (tho didn’t bring up the server screen). It is the same world as before tho… Again thanks for the help. One last question: Am I supposed to use my public ip address when put in the server on minecraft or my laptop’s (server). It appears to not work at all when I use my public one and only works when connected to the same internet when I use my laptops.
Hey Jacob,
Fantastic, it sounds like you’re on the right track!
For your IP question the answer is they both should work, but the reason it doesn’t work on the public IP is usually firewalls and needing to set up a port forward on your router for the Minecraft ports. Have you done the port forwarding yet? Otherwise the traffic won’t be forwarded to your server. Most firewalls will block external connections as well on the computer so check your Windows Firewall and or other security settings as well. The public IP network will be the “public” network type.
Hopefully that helps!
It looks like it’s working great! Thanks for your help!
No problem, take care Jacob!
Anybody got problem server not running with os issue?
Like a message below
Failed to open curl lib from binary, use libcurl.so instead
Please suggest me for how to fix it.
Hi there, if you are running two servers, check what ports are you using.
Hey ALTELMA,
We have encountered this before actually. The package to install should be “libcurl4” but ThreadOne from this thread had to do a manual install for some reason. You may be able to force reinstall libcurl4 with a:
apt-get --reinstall installBut if that doesn’t work go ahead and try ThreadOne’s steps here.