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.
Hey, I’ve been having some issues since the update yesterday with the server starting up. Specifically, the start.sh script seems to hang while checking for updates. I’m left with the message:
Checking for the latest version of Minecraft Bedrock server …
I manually downloaded the new version and copied over the appropriate files, after which I can launch it successfully. In going through the script, it looks like it’s not able to wget the versions.html file and that’s holding up the whole process. Any idea what the issue might be?
No worries at all, I’m sure we can get it going. These are the same issues everyone was having a few weeks back since Mojang/Microsoft keeps blocking “robots” and the SetupMinecraft.sh script is seen as a robot by the web server. I’m positive that this project / your servers are not the target of this and that they’re probably fighting with other “bad” types of robots hitting their servers and we are just getting caught up in the battle since on their web server the user agent would have been showing up as wget instead of a browser a “person” would use (it’s now Chrome for the user agent in the newer versions).
I would actually download and run SetupMinecraft.sh again over the top of your existing installation. It’s designed to do that safely without you losing anything and update all the scripts for you. When you run SetupMinecraft.sh and put in your existing server label/name in there it will detect it’s already there and change into “update mode”.
The SetupMinecraft.sh script changes a lot of things in start.sh and the other scripts from GitHub (those ones are basically templates that have placeholder values such as “usernamereplace” etc. that get replaced based on what you put in SetupMinecraft.sh) if that makes sense. The start.sh and other templates definitely won’t work with any server with the default placeholder values from GitHub since they aren’t real and don’t lead to anything etc.
I think you’re for sure getting hit by the issues I fixed a few weeks back here (not able to download the update files is one of them) and just need to let the SetupMinecraft.sh update the scripts (make sure you delete the existing SetupMinecraft.sh you may have had from before and download a fresh one from GitHub) and you should be good to go. Definitely give that a try and let me know what you find!
paul isinger
3 years ago
I typed “gamerule showcoordinates true” in the chat with operator permissions and it worked for those wondering.
You beat me to it, thanks for posting the solution as well for others!
paul isinger
3 years ago
Has anyone been able to get coordinates to display? I have operator permissions set for myself in the whitelist and the options appear enabled…but do not toggle. This is with the newest 1.17 version.
The server.properties file is in ~/minecraftbe/yourservername/server.properties. You can open a file window and go to your home folder (which is what ~ means) if you’re on a desktop OS or on the terminal:
cd ~/minecraftbe/yourservername/
nano server.properties
This will open the file in a text editor. Once you’re finished press Ctrl+X to save and then answer “y”. Now start/restart the server and you should be good to go!
Could you explain me better?
I open Putty and enter with my user, then what should I do? My servername is what I put in label? I have a lot of problems, thanks for your answers!
Sorry for the slow response! That’s right, the server name is what you put in the label, and that will be the name of the folder you want to go into.
If you change yourservername to what you put for your label you should be all set!
Derek
3 years ago
Thanks for this script and tutorial! After I helped my son set up a bedrock server on his windows laptop here at the house, I thought it would be better to have a dedicated cloud instance for him and his friends to connect to. So we created an AWS Lightsail Ubuntu instance but had installed the java Minecraft version first (we followed the official AWS documentation). So with everything configured, he tells me. “Oh wait, Nintendo Switches can’t connect to the java version.” WTF!? After removing the java version and rebooting the server, I found your super helpful tutorial. Everything worked like a charm.
Since the Nintendo switch can’t connect to minecraft servers by ip, only by domain name, we had to get creative. Well, we were already in AWS, so I bought a domain via Route 53, attached a static ip to it (free), and configured the A DNS record. I also allowed ICMP echo requests in the Lightsail instance firewall so we could quickly ping it to verify it’s running (and resolves). After about an hour and half from first start, he connected his Nintendo Switch to the server!
I did have a note for those who may need it:
– we chose to start the bedrock server at startup which means we are not immediately dropped into the minecraft console when we SSH in. The helpful command here is “screen -ls” – this will list the other screens (minecraft console) and to attach to it, just type “screen -r” – when you want to disconnect, hit ctrl+a and then ctrl+d.
Super cool that you do the hosing in AWS!
While I installed this with junior, flushing a Windows rig, installing Ubuntu (and dusting off BIOS/secure boot skills), we also spent some time discussing specs/requirements. That led to a little lesson on elastic compute, too. If our initiative gets “out of hand” with a lot of users, I’ll def. check out AWS Lightsail — thanks for sharing!
I’m so glad this worked out for you this way instead of the other way around and that I get to be the good guy this time! I’ve had lots of people who have used my Raspberry Pi Java based script thinking they were going to get Bedrock as well. Microsoft doesn’t do anyone any favors with how they market and distinguish their products either (think Xbox One X vs Xbox Series X for example). If they were trying to obfuscate on purpose I’d be surprised if they did as good of a job as they seem to be unintentionally doing!
I run this very web server off a Ubuntu Lightsail AWS instance as well. I’ve been happy with it and am using the “bigger” $80/mo server with 16 GB of memory and it has been fantastic and hosts all my different projects in there. I’m glad you figured out you have to open the ports in the Lightsail console as it has it’s own web-based firewall basically.
Fantastic work, I’ve been extremely impressed with the configurations you guys have been coming up with (usually out of necessity) to get this going and thanks for sharing it!
Thanks James! I went for the $5 tier on Lightsail and have been observing the Metric Graphs for bursting. I think only 4 users maxed joined the game at any given time and even thought it was bursting at 17%, my burst capacity remains at 100% (basically, the room AWS will give the server to overclock the CPU, the higher the percentage the better! Ironically, this was another one of those AWS details that I felt was not written/explained well and so I understood it in reverse first! Lol.) Next steps are to start whitelisting my son’s friends so I can lock down the server better.
I remembered a tip too: I not only had to open port 19132 on TCP but on UDP as well. This was required for both PC and the Switch to join.
That sounds really good! The Bedrock server is fortunately a lot more resource efficient than the Java server (by a lot). It’s super confusing but I believe the burst at 100% is your monthly allotment. It sounds like it’s bursting a little bit during periods of high load which probably won’t be a big deal. It’s when you have a high % sustained for very long periods of time like hours or days that you’ll definitely start to see that getting chewed up. I’d just suggest keeping an eye on it to make sure those numbers stay clear as AWS does very little to warn you when you’re doing something that is costing you extra money. There’s been several times where I was paying for a service and had to go through their reports to even get the category of where to look and then go delete some lease or instance somewhere that I had no clue was still runnning.
I’ve been really happy with them so far though, this option would work for a lot of people who have too slow/restrictive of a connection or want to have more players than most lines will support. Thanks again for giving your story and outcome!
Henrik
3 years ago
Hi James – thanks a bunch for the instructions and the script! The kids in junior’s class is hanging out on my old gaming rig, now converted to Ubuntu MC BR server 🙂
Two quick questions; when I attach to the screen, I see server log output and can enter commands.
However, the server does not show any timestamps (but I see them in your screenshot above). I also cannot do any autocomplete (using TAB) in the console.
(No difference if I’m coming in from the keyboard on the box itself, or via putty from remote)
Thanks for the thanks! It looks like you jumped in and very quickly found some of the most annoying Bedrock server limitations. The official Bedrock dedicated server console is pretty terrible. I can definitely explain them which will give you some options in how to manage these limitations.
The timestamp one is actually an extra nasty one. The Minecraft Bedrock official server actually does not support any logging or timestamps. What you’re seeing in that screenshot is a little trick using the “screen” application like this:
That nightmare above is the actual command the script launches the server with. The important part of the command for logging/timestamps though is at the very beginning. Since Minecraft Bedrock doesn’t have it’s own timestamps we are using the “screen” application that you are pulling up the server console in to generate these timestamps. It’s an original to this project, although it was right here in the comments that someone suggested doing it since there used to be no timestamps whatsoever!
In summary, the timestamps won’t be available in the console since it’s not supported by the Bedrock server itself but they are always available in the “logs” folder including while the server is running. This means the timestamps are always available but in a different place due to the Bedrock server lacking this feature (or logs period). Whenever I need to check a timestamp I either sftp in and open the log file with something like WinSCP on Windows or FileZilla on Linux or open the log file with nano over SSH. There’s a bunch of different approaches you can take, but I wanted to explain the limitations since in the past that has helped others decide the best way to manage it after understanding where the limitations are coming from. They’re basically inside the natively built Bedrock server binary outside of our control.
For the autocomplete part this is another limitation of the Bedrock console. I don’t have any magic bullets for this one and can only tell you the best answer is to actually not really use it much. Fortunately once you “op” yourself you can do literally every command you can do in the server console in your Minecraft client and that one DOES have autocomplete. In fact, it will show you all the commands you have access to when you op yourself which is a really useful reference when you can partially remember a command. I pretty much only use the console to look for immediate errors while the server is running or to sometimes type ‘stop’ in or ‘op jamesachambers’ the first time I start a server. At that point you can do everything you can do in the console in the Minecraft client with tab autocompletion. This ends up being the way to go for sure with Bedrock.
Thanks SO much for the reply (super detailed and fast – hat off for doing this for the community!!). Won’t pester you much more, but a few follow-ups (hope this will be valuable for others, too):
I do see timestamps in log for the first few lines (until “Difficulty level”). From then on (“opening world/…”), IP ports, “Server started”, and – most importantly – lines of Player connected/left has no timestamp: — is this expected? Or possible to fix?
For tab-completion/interacting/controlling; seems I need to roll up my sleeves and join in on the fun (I’ve been in the background on ssh here, and junior has been the one playing). Just bought myself a MC for Win10-version so I easier can control from there 🙂
(Now I need to learn more on a bit more granular access control of users)
Thanks so much for your kind words and for letting me know the “Older Comments” was broken! I double checked everything after your post and you are indeed correct. The timestamps you are seeing are ones the Bedrock server is in fact showing. I think to enable screen timestamps might require modifying your ~/.screenrc file (this may be why I didn’t end up going this far, but modifying the profile wouldn’t be a big deal if it asked first). This is pretty easy and I’m curious if this will change your output.
I think this option might be a little old and janky. It seems to periodically write a timestamp to the log during a certain number of seconds of inactivity. I will definitely experiment with this during the daytime here as well but I wanted to reply in case you wanted to give it a go. It looks like you just need to put a few lines in the ~/.screenrc file to enable the logtstamp options. You shouldn’t need the logfile option they have in this guide. The other options they used look great though. They even write every 5 seconds which might be excessive but definitely see if this can help meet your needs. It’s definitely inside the Bedrock server whether it’s deciding to print the timestamps and I thought I had this solved further than I did. You found another thing I need to investigate just like with the “Older Comments” (in a good way, I love fixing these things).
I definitely completely understand why the tab completion was an issue, you were controlling it completely remotely through SSH only! For what it’s worth the Java version’s console doesn’t do much either and is nearly identical and just as pitiful as the Bedrock one. It’s really surprising they didn’t add some kind of web administration backend for Bedrock or anything that is an improvement over Java (if anything some things are even more limited, especially for the dedicated server which is a second class citizen to the paid “Realms” cloud servers).
Let me know what you find and I’ll post my follow up when I can experiment with these options too!
Thanks for the pointer, James!
Did some testing, and now have a decent timestamping of the log (does not show on the console, but in the log file – it solves my need).
Background: I have a completely default install of Ubuntu Server 20.04 as suggested by James, not touched /etc/screenrc (so that seems pretty standard), and I did not have any .screenrc in my home directory.
HOWTO: I created ~/.screenrc where I added two lines, only the first is essential, I think:
logtstamp on
logtstamp after 2
You can also add a third line to customize the timestamp; I didn’t bother, but check the link from James above if you fancy a custom string.
I did not have timezone set correctly, so timestamps were set in UTC. A quick `sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata´ did the trick to make it more readable.
NOTE: The startup script (start.sh) loads screen with -L to enable logging (and specifying a log file with unique names), so that’s not needed in .screenrc.
But – this way to configure logging will affect all instances of screen. Since I only run a Minecraft server on this box, this works for me. You can alternatively specify a separate settings file (screen -c …), but that requires you to edit the start.sh script, and possibly modify it again after future updates)
And two quick things (not really related, but for Linux newbies like myself);
I created two shell scripts (would probably be even easier with alias) to make it low-friction to get hold of the most recent logs:
To open the latest log file, do: nano $(ls -1t /{serverpath}/logs/* | /bin/sed q)
…and to tail the same thing: tail -f $(ls -1t /{serverpath}/logs/* | /bin/sed q)
Wow, what a fantastic writeup! This is great. It’s definitely not perfect like we discussed where it basically works the opposite way you would think it should. Instead of timestamping every line it timestamps when there’s an absence of lines for a period of time.
Using this built in screen tool though we can still be able to tell when things are happening in the log in a very roundabout way! It’s still more than the Bedrock server will give which is absolutely nothing and is a great solution for a lot of people other than really specific and special circumstances where this might not be good enough and they need the exact millisecond something happened etc. in which case they’re really going to be out of luck with Bedrock.
Thanks so much for sharing. I definitely think I should add this as an option to the installer!
alex
3 years ago
Some great work here 🙂
I am struggle on number 99 here.
Issue:
Everything ran without issue until trying to start the server
Setup is complete. Starting Minecraft server...
Minecraft server failed to start after 20 seconds.
There is no screen to be resumed matching alexrock.
sudo systemctl start minecraftbe
Failed to start minecraftbe.service: Unit minecraft.service not found.
Environment:
RockPi 4B
Ubuntu Server – fresh install
The RockPi 4B is a ARM board if I remember correctly. I have the script set to work on Raspberry Pis but I have not tried it on a RockPi 4B before. The script assumes it can install QEMU packages through apt to emulate x86_64 and I’m guessing that may be where the problem is since the packages might be slightly different than Raspberry Pi OS’s package names. Do you get any output in your servers “logs” folder?
One thing I’d like you to try is running the server manually on the CLI by running this command:
This should theoretically just throw an error letting us know further what we might need to tweak to get it working on the RockPi 4B. Let me know what you find!
Hey, I’ve been having some issues since the update yesterday with the server starting up. Specifically, the start.sh script seems to hang while checking for updates. I’m left with the message:
Checking for the latest version of Minecraft Bedrock server …
I manually downloaded the new version and copied over the appropriate files, after which I can launch it successfully. In going through the script, it looks like it’s not able to wget the versions.html file and that’s holding up the whole process. Any idea what the issue might be?
Hey Chad,
No worries at all, I’m sure we can get it going. These are the same issues everyone was having a few weeks back since Mojang/Microsoft keeps blocking “robots” and the SetupMinecraft.sh script is seen as a robot by the web server. I’m positive that this project / your servers are not the target of this and that they’re probably fighting with other “bad” types of robots hitting their servers and we are just getting caught up in the battle since on their web server the user agent would have been showing up as wget instead of a browser a “person” would use (it’s now Chrome for the user agent in the newer versions).
I would actually download and run SetupMinecraft.sh again over the top of your existing installation. It’s designed to do that safely without you losing anything and update all the scripts for you. When you run SetupMinecraft.sh and put in your existing server label/name in there it will detect it’s already there and change into “update mode”.
The SetupMinecraft.sh script changes a lot of things in start.sh and the other scripts from GitHub (those ones are basically templates that have placeholder values such as “usernamereplace” etc. that get replaced based on what you put in SetupMinecraft.sh) if that makes sense. The start.sh and other templates definitely won’t work with any server with the default placeholder values from GitHub since they aren’t real and don’t lead to anything etc.
I think you’re for sure getting hit by the issues I fixed a few weeks back here (not able to download the update files is one of them) and just need to let the SetupMinecraft.sh update the scripts (make sure you delete the existing SetupMinecraft.sh you may have had from before and download a fresh one from GitHub) and you should be good to go. Definitely give that a try and let me know what you find!
I typed “gamerule showcoordinates true” in the chat with operator permissions and it worked for those wondering.
Hey Paul,
You beat me to it, thanks for posting the solution as well for others!
Has anyone been able to get coordinates to display? I have operator permissions set for myself in the whitelist and the options appear enabled…but do not toggle. This is with the newest 1.17 version.
Hi, how i can change the server properties¿?
Hey Mejia,
The server.properties file is in ~/minecraftbe/yourservername/server.properties. You can open a file window and go to your home folder (which is what ~ means) if you’re on a desktop OS or on the terminal:
cd ~/minecraftbe/yourservername/nano server.properties
This will open the file in a text editor. Once you’re finished press Ctrl+X to save and then answer “y”. Now start/restart the server and you should be good to go!
Could you explain me better?
I open Putty and enter with my user, then what should I do? My servername is what I put in label? I have a lot of problems, thanks for your answers!
Hey Meija,
Sorry for the slow response! That’s right, the server name is what you put in the label, and that will be the name of the folder you want to go into.
If you change yourservername to what you put for your label you should be all set!
Thanks for this script and tutorial! After I helped my son set up a bedrock server on his windows laptop here at the house, I thought it would be better to have a dedicated cloud instance for him and his friends to connect to. So we created an AWS Lightsail Ubuntu instance but had installed the java Minecraft version first (we followed the official AWS documentation). So with everything configured, he tells me. “Oh wait, Nintendo Switches can’t connect to the java version.” WTF!? After removing the java version and rebooting the server, I found your super helpful tutorial. Everything worked like a charm.
Since the Nintendo switch can’t connect to minecraft servers by ip, only by domain name, we had to get creative. Well, we were already in AWS, so I bought a domain via Route 53, attached a static ip to it (free), and configured the A DNS record. I also allowed ICMP echo requests in the Lightsail instance firewall so we could quickly ping it to verify it’s running (and resolves). After about an hour and half from first start, he connected his Nintendo Switch to the server!
I did have a note for those who may need it:
– we chose to start the bedrock server at startup which means we are not immediately dropped into the minecraft console when we SSH in. The helpful command here is “screen -ls” – this will list the other screens (minecraft console) and to attach to it, just type “screen -r” – when you want to disconnect, hit ctrl+a and then ctrl+d.
Super cool that you do the hosing in AWS!
While I installed this with junior, flushing a Windows rig, installing Ubuntu (and dusting off BIOS/secure boot skills), we also spent some time discussing specs/requirements. That led to a little lesson on elastic compute, too. If our initiative gets “out of hand” with a lot of users, I’ll def. check out AWS Lightsail — thanks for sharing!
Hey Derek,
I’m so glad this worked out for you this way instead of the other way around and that I get to be the good guy this time! I’ve had lots of people who have used my Raspberry Pi Java based script thinking they were going to get Bedrock as well. Microsoft doesn’t do anyone any favors with how they market and distinguish their products either (think Xbox One X vs Xbox Series X for example). If they were trying to obfuscate on purpose I’d be surprised if they did as good of a job as they seem to be unintentionally doing!
I run this very web server off a Ubuntu Lightsail AWS instance as well. I’ve been happy with it and am using the “bigger” $80/mo server with 16 GB of memory and it has been fantastic and hosts all my different projects in there. I’m glad you figured out you have to open the ports in the Lightsail console as it has it’s own web-based firewall basically.
Fantastic work, I’ve been extremely impressed with the configurations you guys have been coming up with (usually out of necessity) to get this going and thanks for sharing it!
Thanks James! I went for the $5 tier on Lightsail and have been observing the Metric Graphs for bursting. I think only 4 users maxed joined the game at any given time and even thought it was bursting at 17%, my burst capacity remains at 100% (basically, the room AWS will give the server to overclock the CPU, the higher the percentage the better! Ironically, this was another one of those AWS details that I felt was not written/explained well and so I understood it in reverse first! Lol.) Next steps are to start whitelisting my son’s friends so I can lock down the server better.
I remembered a tip too: I not only had to open port 19132 on TCP but on UDP as well. This was required for both PC and the Switch to join.
Hey Derek,
That sounds really good! The Bedrock server is fortunately a lot more resource efficient than the Java server (by a lot). It’s super confusing but I believe the burst at 100% is your monthly allotment. It sounds like it’s bursting a little bit during periods of high load which probably won’t be a big deal. It’s when you have a high % sustained for very long periods of time like hours or days that you’ll definitely start to see that getting chewed up. I’d just suggest keeping an eye on it to make sure those numbers stay clear as AWS does very little to warn you when you’re doing something that is costing you extra money. There’s been several times where I was paying for a service and had to go through their reports to even get the category of where to look and then go delete some lease or instance somewhere that I had no clue was still runnning.
I’ve been really happy with them so far though, this option would work for a lot of people who have too slow/restrictive of a connection or want to have more players than most lines will support. Thanks again for giving your story and outcome!
Hi James – thanks a bunch for the instructions and the script! The kids in junior’s class is hanging out on my old gaming rig, now converted to Ubuntu MC BR server 🙂
Two quick questions; when I attach to the screen, I see server log output and can enter commands.
However, the server does not show any timestamps (but I see them in your screenshot above). I also cannot do any autocomplete (using TAB) in the console.
(No difference if I’m coming in from the keyboard on the box itself, or via putty from remote)
Hey Henrik,
Thanks for the thanks! It looks like you jumped in and very quickly found some of the most annoying Bedrock server limitations. The official Bedrock dedicated server console is pretty terrible. I can definitely explain them which will give you some options in how to manage these limitations.
The timestamp one is actually an extra nasty one. The Minecraft Bedrock official server actually does not support any logging or timestamps. What you’re seeing in that screenshot is a little trick using the “screen” application like this:
screen -L -Logfile logs/servername.$(date +%Y.%m.%d.%H.%M.%S).log -dmS servername /bin/bash -c "LD_LIBRARY_PATH=dirname/minecraftbe/servername dirname/minecraftbe/servername/bedrock_server"That nightmare above is the actual command the script launches the server with. The important part of the command for logging/timestamps though is at the very beginning. Since Minecraft Bedrock doesn’t have it’s own timestamps we are using the “screen” application that you are pulling up the server console in to generate these timestamps. It’s an original to this project, although it was right here in the comments that someone suggested doing it since there used to be no timestamps whatsoever!
In summary, the timestamps won’t be available in the console since it’s not supported by the Bedrock server itself but they are always available in the “logs” folder including while the server is running. This means the timestamps are always available but in a different place due to the Bedrock server lacking this feature (or logs period). Whenever I need to check a timestamp I either sftp in and open the log file with something like WinSCP on Windows or FileZilla on Linux or open the log file with nano over SSH. There’s a bunch of different approaches you can take, but I wanted to explain the limitations since in the past that has helped others decide the best way to manage it after understanding where the limitations are coming from. They’re basically inside the natively built Bedrock server binary outside of our control.
For the autocomplete part this is another limitation of the Bedrock console. I don’t have any magic bullets for this one and can only tell you the best answer is to actually not really use it much. Fortunately once you “op” yourself you can do literally every command you can do in the server console in your Minecraft client and that one DOES have autocomplete. In fact, it will show you all the commands you have access to when you op yourself which is a really useful reference when you can partially remember a command. I pretty much only use the console to look for immediate errors while the server is running or to sometimes type ‘stop’ in or ‘op jamesachambers’ the first time I start a server. At that point you can do everything you can do in the console in the Minecraft client with tab autocompletion. This ends up being the way to go for sure with Bedrock.
Hopefully that all helps!
Thanks SO much for the reply (super detailed and fast – hat off for doing this for the community!!). Won’t pester you much more, but a few follow-ups (hope this will be valuable for others, too):
I do see timestamps in log for the first few lines (until “Difficulty level”). From then on (“opening world/…”), IP ports, “Server started”, and – most importantly – lines of Player connected/left has no timestamp:
— is this expected? Or possible to fix?
For tab-completion/interacting/controlling; seems I need to roll up my sleeves and join in on the fun (I’ve been in the background on ssh here, and junior has been the one playing). Just bought myself a MC for Win10-version so I easier can control from there 🙂
(Now I need to learn more on a bit more granular access control of users)
Hey Henrik,
Thanks so much for your kind words and for letting me know the “Older Comments” was broken! I double checked everything after your post and you are indeed correct. The timestamps you are seeing are ones the Bedrock server is in fact showing. I think to enable screen timestamps might require modifying your ~/.screenrc file (this may be why I didn’t end up going this far, but modifying the profile wouldn’t be a big deal if it asked first). This is pretty easy and I’m curious if this will change your output.
I think this option might be a little old and janky. It seems to periodically write a timestamp to the log during a certain number of seconds of inactivity. I will definitely experiment with this during the daytime here as well but I wanted to reply in case you wanted to give it a go. It looks like you just need to put a few lines in the ~/.screenrc file to enable the logtstamp options. You shouldn’t need the logfile option they have in this guide. The other options they used look great though. They even write every 5 seconds which might be excessive but definitely see if this can help meet your needs. It’s definitely inside the Bedrock server whether it’s deciding to print the timestamps and I thought I had this solved further than I did. You found another thing I need to investigate just like with the “Older Comments” (in a good way, I love fixing these things).
I definitely completely understand why the tab completion was an issue, you were controlling it completely remotely through SSH only! For what it’s worth the Java version’s console doesn’t do much either and is nearly identical and just as pitiful as the Bedrock one. It’s really surprising they didn’t add some kind of web administration backend for Bedrock or anything that is an improvement over Java (if anything some things are even more limited, especially for the dedicated server which is a second class citizen to the paid “Realms” cloud servers).
Let me know what you find and I’ll post my follow up when I can experiment with these options too!
Thanks for the pointer, James!
Did some testing, and now have a decent timestamping of the log (does not show on the console, but in the log file – it solves my need).
Background: I have a completely default install of Ubuntu Server 20.04 as suggested by James, not touched /etc/screenrc (so that seems pretty standard), and I did not have any .screenrc in my home directory.
HOWTO: I created ~/.screenrc where I added two lines, only the first is essential, I think:
logtstamp on
logtstamp after 2
You can also add a third line to customize the timestamp; I didn’t bother, but check the link from James above if you fancy a custom string.
I did not have timezone set correctly, so timestamps were set in UTC. A quick `sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata´ did the trick to make it more readable.
NOTE: The startup script (start.sh) loads screen with -L to enable logging (and specifying a log file with unique names), so that’s not needed in .screenrc.
But – this way to configure logging will affect all instances of screen. Since I only run a Minecraft server on this box, this works for me. You can alternatively specify a separate settings file (screen -c …), but that requires you to edit the start.sh script, and possibly modify it again after future updates)
And two quick things (not really related, but for Linux newbies like myself);
I created two shell scripts (would probably be even easier with alias) to make it low-friction to get hold of the most recent logs:
To open the latest log file, do: nano $(ls -1t /{serverpath}/logs/* | /bin/sed q)
…and to tail the same thing: tail -f $(ls -1t /{serverpath}/logs/* | /bin/sed q)
Hey Henrik,
Wow, what a fantastic writeup! This is great. It’s definitely not perfect like we discussed where it basically works the opposite way you would think it should. Instead of timestamping every line it timestamps when there’s an absence of lines for a period of time.
Using this built in screen tool though we can still be able to tell when things are happening in the log in a very roundabout way! It’s still more than the Bedrock server will give which is absolutely nothing and is a great solution for a lot of people other than really specific and special circumstances where this might not be good enough and they need the exact millisecond something happened etc. in which case they’re really going to be out of luck with Bedrock.
Thanks so much for sharing. I definitely think I should add this as an option to the installer!
Some great work here 🙂
I am struggle on number 99 here.
Issue:
Everything ran without issue until trying to start the server
Setup is complete. Starting Minecraft server...Minecraft server failed to start after 20 seconds.
There is no screen to be resumed matching alexrock.
sudo systemctl start minecraftbe
Failed to start minecraftbe.service: Unit minecraft.service not found.
Environment:
RockPi 4B
Ubuntu Server – fresh install
Any help would be amazing!
Hey Alex,
The RockPi 4B is a ARM board if I remember correctly. I have the script set to work on Raspberry Pis but I have not tried it on a RockPi 4B before. The script assumes it can install QEMU packages through apt to emulate x86_64 and I’m guessing that may be where the problem is since the packages might be slightly different than Raspberry Pi OS’s package names. Do you get any output in your servers “logs” folder?
One thing I’d like you to try is running the server manually on the CLI by running this command:
LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/youruser/minecraftbe/alexrock /home/youruser/minecraftbe/alexrock/bedrock_serverThis should theoretically just throw an error letting us know further what we might need to tweak to get it working on the RockPi 4B. Let me know what you find!