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.
Hello I use Ubuntu 21.04 (GNU/Linux 5.11.0-22-generic x86_64) and also get an error message during installation since recently, this script ran before without problems!
done on 03.07.21 at 16 o’clock Europe/Berlin timezone
Latest version always at https://github.com/TheRemote/MinecraftBedrockServer
Don't forget to set up port forwarding on your router! The default port is 19132
100 14960 100 14960 0 0 52125 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 51944
Update Apt.
OK:1 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hirsute InRelease.
OK:2 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hirsute-updates InRelease.
OK:3 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hirsute-backports InRelease
OK:4 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hirsute-security InRelease
Package lists are read... Done
Check and install dependencies...
E: Lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend could not be opened. - open (13: permission denied)
E: Unable to reach lock for dpkg-frontend (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend); are you root?
Package lists are read... Done
Dependency tree is being built... Done
Status information is read... Done
libcurl4 is already the latest version (7.74.0-1ubuntu2).
0 updated, 0 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 0 not updated.
Package lists are read... Done
Dependency tree is built... Done
Status information is read... Done
libc6 is already the latest version (2.33-0ubuntu5).
0 updated, 0 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 0 not updated.
Package lists are read... Done
Dependency tree is built... Done
Status information is read... Done
libcrypt1 is already the latest version (1:4.4.17-1ubuntu3).
0 updated, 0 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 0 not updated.
Dependency installation completed
.......
Daily automatic reboot and backup of server at 4am (y/n)?y
Daily restart scheduled. To change the time or remove the automatic restart, type crontab -e
The setup is complete. Starting the Minecraft server...
The Minecraft server has been started. Type screen -r homeserver to see the server running!
You must be connected to a terminal.
marcel@homeserver:~$ screen -ls
No sockets found in /run/screen/S-marcel.
Translated from Goole, since I don’t really know english! 🙂
Google is your friend! hihi
That’s an interesting one, it looks like your apt package manager is already in use from these lines:
E: Lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend could not be opened. – open (13: permission denied)
E: Unable to reach lock for dpkg-frontend (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend); are you root?
Can you try rebooting the system? It’s also possible you are using an account that is not a member of the “sudoers” group (this is uncommon but not impossible and has happened a couple of times before). If the apt manager is in use it won’t be able to install gawk and I think that is why it’s not starting!
I also wonder if it’s because your default language on the computer isn’t English. I just uploaded a new version that adds the language headers to curl. Can you try again with the latest version?
this behavior (lock file) also occurs with an “apt-get install …” WITHOUT sudo.
Please check lines 64 to 71 in script.
In front of the “apt-get” there is the “sudo” missing.
HTH
Greetings, Rick
BTW
Line 59 will not work out
“apt-get install sudo” to install sudo will also fail with same error messages.
IMHO, here are root permissions necessary . . .
You’re right this is a problem, but youcannot call a sudo anything without sudo installed so that’s why the sudo line doesn’t have it but the other ones should. This initial line is before I started disallowing the script to run as root because if you ran it as root it would install sudo and continue successfully. I’m going to remove this line completely and leave this unresolvable by the script as it’s not going to work as is and if someone is using a distro without sudo installed (there are some but not too many) I assume they are going to know how to take care of that since they’re usually advanced setups.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I’ll add sudo to the other lines here and commit this fix to GitHub!
No problem, thanks for bringing this to my attention, missing the sudos was a silly mistake and since most of these requirements are already present it certainly explains why some people weren’t getting gawk even though I was certain I added that as a dependency!
Hello James,
I have completely deleted the folder “minecraftbe” again and run the curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/MinecraftBedrockServer/master/SetupMinecraft.sh | bash again. Now there was no error message like the first time.
I mean this message here: E: Lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend could not be opened. - open (13: permission denied)
E: Unable to reach lock for dpkg-frontend (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend); are you root?
As already written, reinstalled, ran through without error.
Added my old map again.
NOTHING changed on the system.
Result:
Server runs!!!!
Great work again from you. And that in the short time! I can only bow and thank you from the bottom of my heart for your quick response!
I still have one question for you,
I use your script only for 2-3 weeks and have not seen this yet that he deletes backups alone.
would it be possible, the server makes every time he starts a backup. So I have set it at least with me. That the server does not always keep all backups on the hard drive, but I say, a backup what is older than 2 weeks automatically deleted?
Because I think there also a little bit of the hard disk space, otherwise the hard disk would burst sometime before loud backups! 🙂
Welcome back! I definitely have a theory here. On Ubuntu and a lot of other Linux distros apt-get is ran by the system to install “critical” patches in the background invisibly/silently. The only indication that this is happening is if you check the apt logs or happen to try to install something while it is checking / downloading critical system updates.
I believe this is what happened to you. Since your package manager was busy and it couldn’t get a “lock” on the file (this just means something else was already using apt, very likely the system like I mentioned before) this operation failed. The problem is there is a new requirement in the new version which is “gawk”. The next time you ran the script it succeeded as the system’s updates completed in the background and the apt “lock” was removed!
The backups are supposed to rotate every 10 backups (meaning it should only be keeping a maximum of 10 backups, the oldest ones will be pruned). This is supposed to happen with these lines in start.sh:
# Rotate backups -- keep most recent 10
Rotate=$(pushd dirname/minecraftbe/servername/backups; ls -1tr | head -n -10 | xargs -d '\n' rm -f --; popd)
The variables will be changed to match your paths but I’m willing to bet if you run that command yourself on the command line it will prune the backups. I suspect for some reason it’s not pruning though when ran by systemd or even when executed in start.sh. Can you confirm you have more than 10 backups that haven’t rotated? I can definitely investigate this!
Rob Marshall
3 years ago
After updating to the new script, the server was not able to start for me until I installed gawk. (running it on Ubunut 20.04 LTS desktop)
Did you use an old SetupMinecraft.sh to update your scripts? I stopped recommending anyone save it because it’s always going to be outdated. The SetupMinecraft.sh script was also updated to install gawk for you. If you’re missing gawk delete SetupMinecraft and run it directly using curl so it grabs the latest version!
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package libcrypt1
Dependency installation completed
bash: line 82: syntax error near unexpected token else'
I fixed that just a couple of minutes before you posted this. Can you give it another try?
James Hunter
3 years ago
Here is what I get when running the new SetupMinecraft.sh on Debian, which is what it was running just fine on prior:
Checking and installing dependencies..
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), are you root?
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), are you root?
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
libcurl4 is already the newest version (7.64.0-4+deb10u2).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
libc6 is already the newest version (2.28-10).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package libcrypt1
Dependency installation completed.
./SetupMinecraft.sh: line 91: syntax error near unexpected token
else'
./SetupMinecraft.sh: line 91:else'
james@dingbat:~$
Good catch, sorry it has been a long day and the changelog is getting really long so I was bound to make a mistake eventually. Can you give this another try? I’ve committed the fix!
Okay, it finished SetupMinecraft.sh now without error until the very end where it starts giving the error that the network device cannot be detected…. trying again…. The script finished but the server never started. When I run start.sh I get the same network device error around line 43. Did the start.sh script change regarding network devices?
That’s progress! I think I know what is happening. I just committed a fix that should get the network detection working on Debian again. Can you give it a try when you have a chance and let me know if that took care of it for you?
Don’t sweat it at all, thanks for bearing with me through multiple issues, I’m very glad it’s up and running!
Goretech
3 years ago
oops, i met version Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS . I do sudo apt install curl, but then run the script, and it uninstalls libcurl4/curl, and installs libcurl3, but not curl, and the script then tries to download start.sh with curl but fails.
Got it, that is why I missed this, I am using Ubuntu 20.04 and if you try to install libcurl3 over the top it tells you a better package is already installed and won’t let you clobber it. It sounds like on 18.04 it actually does let you fully install the package and will actually remove curl itself through this dependency mess!
Fix is live on GitHub, thank you!
Goretech
3 years ago
The install script using curl is removing curl and then it doesn’t fetch the start.sh. Ubuntu 19
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/MinecraftBedrockServer/master/SetupMinecraft.sh | bash
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0Minecraft Bedrock Server installation script by James Chambers
Latest version always at https://github.com/TheRemote/MinecraftBedrockServer
Don't forget to set up port forwarding on your router! The default port is 19132
100 14915 100 14915 0 0 106k 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 106k
find: ‘SetupMinecraft.sh’: No such file or directory
Updating apt..
Hit:1 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic InRelease
Hit:2 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-security InRelease
Hit:3 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates InRelease
Hit:4 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-backports InRelease
Hit:5 https://downloads.plex.tv/repo/deb public InRelease
Hit:6 http://ppa.launchpad.net/certbot/certbot/ubuntu bionic InRelease
Hit:7 https://packages.microsoft.com/ubuntu/19.04/prod disco InRelease
Reading package lists... Done
Checking and installing dependencies..
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
libcurl4 is already the newest version (7.58.0-2ubuntu3.13).
libcurl4 set to manually installed.
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
cmake-data libjsoncpp1 librhash0
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
cmake-data libjsoncpp1 librhash0
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
curl libcurl4
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libcurl3
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/214 kB of archives.
After this operation, 407 kB disk space will be freed.
(Reading database ... 148012 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing curl (7.58.0-2ubuntu3.13) ...
Oh wow, that’s some unexpected behavior there. I’ve reworked it into this:
CurlVer=$(apt-cache show libcurl4 | grep Version | awk 'NR==1{ print $2 }')
if [[ "$CurlVer" ]]; then
sudo apt-get install libcurl4 -y; fi
else
# Install libcurl3 for backwards compatibility in case libcurl4 isn't available
CurlVer=$(apt-cache show libcurl3 | grep Version | awk 'NR==1{ print $2 }')
if [[ "$CurlVer" ]]; then sudo apt-get install libcurl3 -y; fi
fi
Now if libcurl4 is already available/present it will not even look to see if libcurl3 is available in the repositories let alone attempt to install it. Thank you for reporting this, the fix is now live on GitHub!
Alex
3 years ago
Error on the second to last line of start.sh that was causing the server to fail startup.
strftime not defined error
I just commented out the line that contained “strftime” and it started.
But this is a fantastic set of scripts and I appreciate your time and effort in creating and maintaining it!
Thanks for the feedback and kind words! I actually have not heard of this before but I suspect it’s compatibility/portability related (the awk utility) between different distros. Can I ask which OS you are using? I’m assuming it’s not Ubuntu but I may need to make some adjustments if I did this in a non platform-independentish way.
Basically if you comment out the strftime line all you are doing is disabling timestamps in the logs. I actually left these two lines broken up incidentally (it’s how it was committed in the Pull Request and I didn’t recombine them). I’d probably rather just do some research though and find a more portable function than strftime that does the same thing and knowing your distro will help a little with that.
Even though this guide is for Ubuntu I’ve always tried to keep it portable enough that it will run on just about anything (as long as they cover the few required packages that apt installed which are pretty easy to find if they aren’t already present).
I am wondering if your awk version is MAWK which comes with Debian for example. You may want to see if gawk can be installed as that could be a potential solution but as stated earlier I am working to find a way to do this that will work across distros.
I uploaded a new version that uses gawk instead if you’d like to try it (download SetupMinecraft.sh again and try running it, it should take care of the dependency unless you don’t have apt on your distro).
Thanks again for reporting this and I’m curious which distro it’s on!
Hello I use Ubuntu 21.04 (GNU/Linux 5.11.0-22-generic x86_64) and also get an error message during installation since recently, this script ran before without problems!
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/MinecraftBedrockServer/master/SetupMinecraft.sh | bashdone on 03.07.21 at 16 o’clock Europe/Berlin timezone
Latest version always at https://github.com/TheRemote/MinecraftBedrockServerDon't forget to set up port forwarding on your router! The default port is 19132
100 14960 100 14960 0 0 52125 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 51944
Update Apt.
OK:1 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hirsute InRelease.
OK:2 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hirsute-updates InRelease.
OK:3 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hirsute-backports InRelease
OK:4 http://de.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu hirsute-security InRelease
Package lists are read... Done
Check and install dependencies...
E: Lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend could not be opened. - open (13: permission denied)
E: Unable to reach lock for dpkg-frontend (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend); are you root?
Package lists are read... Done
Dependency tree is being built... Done
Status information is read... Done
libcurl4 is already the latest version (7.74.0-1ubuntu2).
0 updated, 0 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 0 not updated.
Package lists are read... Done
Dependency tree is built... Done
Status information is read... Done
libc6 is already the latest version (2.33-0ubuntu5).
0 updated, 0 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 0 not updated.
Package lists are read... Done
Dependency tree is built... Done
Status information is read... Done
libcrypt1 is already the latest version (1:4.4.17-1ubuntu3).
0 updated, 0 reinstalled, 0 to remove and 0 not updated.
Dependency installation completed
.......
Daily automatic reboot and backup of server at 4am (y/n)?y
Daily restart scheduled. To change the time or remove the automatic restart, type crontab -e
The setup is complete. Starting the Minecraft server...
The Minecraft server has been started. Type screen -r homeserver to see the server running!
You must be connected to a terminal.
marcel@homeserver:~$ screen -ls
No sockets found in /run/screen/S-marcel.
Translated from Goole, since I don’t really know english! 🙂
Google is your friend! hihi
Hey Marcel,
That’s an interesting one, it looks like your apt package manager is already in use from these lines:
E: Lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend could not be opened. – open (13: permission denied)E: Unable to reach lock for dpkg-frontend (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend); are you root?
Can you try rebooting the system? It’s also possible you are using an account that is not a member of the “sudoers” group (this is uncommon but not impossible and has happened a couple of times before). If the apt manager is in use it won’t be able to install gawk and I think that is why it’s not starting!
I also wonder if it’s because your default language on the computer isn’t English. I just uploaded a new version that adds the language headers to curl. Can you try again with the latest version?
Hi James,
this behavior (lock file) also occurs with an “apt-get install …” WITHOUT sudo.
Please check lines 64 to 71 in script.
In front of the “apt-get” there is the “sudo” missing.
HTH
Greetings, Rick
BTW
Line 59 will not work out
“apt-get install sudo” to install sudo will also fail with same error messages.
IMHO, here are root permissions necessary . . .
Sorry – forgotten, affects also line 86 in script
Hey Rick,
You’re right this is a problem, but youcannot call a sudo anything without sudo installed so that’s why the sudo line doesn’t have it but the other ones should. This initial line is before I started disallowing the script to run as root because if you ran it as root it would install sudo and continue successfully. I’m going to remove this line completely and leave this unresolvable by the script as it’s not going to work as is and if someone is using a distro without sudo installed (there are some but not too many) I assume they are going to know how to take care of that since they’re usually advanced setups.
Thanks for bringing this to my attention, I’ll add sudo to the other lines here and commit this fix to GitHub!
Many THX for fixing this and also for the rest of your great work!
Greetings, Rick
Hey Rick,
No problem, thanks for bringing this to my attention, missing the sudos was a silly mistake and since most of these requirements are already present it certainly explains why some people weren’t getting gawk even though I was certain I added that as a dependency!
Many thanks for confirming, cheers and take care!
Hello James,
I have completely deleted the folder “minecraftbe” again and run the
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/MinecraftBedrockServer/master/SetupMinecraft.sh | bashagain. Now there was no error message like the first time.I mean this message here:
E: Lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend could not be opened. - open (13: permission denied)E: Unable to reach lock for dpkg-frontend (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend); are you root?
As already written, reinstalled, ran through without error.
Added my old map again.
NOTHING changed on the system.
Result:
Server runs!!!!
Great work again from you. And that in the short time! I can only bow and thank you from the bottom of my heart for your quick response!
I still have one question for you,
I use your script only for 2-3 weeks and have not seen this yet that he deletes backups alone.
would it be possible, the server makes every time he starts a backup. So I have set it at least with me. That the server does not always keep all backups on the hard drive, but I say, a backup what is older than 2 weeks automatically deleted?
Because I think there also a little bit of the hard disk space, otherwise the hard disk would burst sometime before loud backups! 🙂
With kind regards,
Marcel
Hey Marcel,
Welcome back! I definitely have a theory here. On Ubuntu and a lot of other Linux distros apt-get is ran by the system to install “critical” patches in the background invisibly/silently. The only indication that this is happening is if you check the apt logs or happen to try to install something while it is checking / downloading critical system updates.
I believe this is what happened to you. Since your package manager was busy and it couldn’t get a “lock” on the file (this just means something else was already using apt, very likely the system like I mentioned before) this operation failed. The problem is there is a new requirement in the new version which is “gawk”. The next time you ran the script it succeeded as the system’s updates completed in the background and the apt “lock” was removed!
The backups are supposed to rotate every 10 backups (meaning it should only be keeping a maximum of 10 backups, the oldest ones will be pruned). This is supposed to happen with these lines in start.sh:
# Rotate backups -- keep most recent 10Rotate=$(pushd dirname/minecraftbe/servername/backups; ls -1tr | head -n -10 | xargs -d '\n' rm -f --; popd)
The variables will be changed to match your paths but I’m willing to bet if you run that command yourself on the command line it will prune the backups. I suspect for some reason it’s not pruning though when ran by systemd or even when executed in start.sh. Can you confirm you have more than 10 backups that haven’t rotated? I can definitely investigate this!
After updating to the new script, the server was not able to start for me until I installed gawk. (running it on Ubunut 20.04 LTS desktop)
Hey Rob,
Did you use an old SetupMinecraft.sh to update your scripts? I stopped recommending anyone save it because it’s always going to be outdated. The SetupMinecraft.sh script was also updated to install gawk for you. If you’re missing gawk delete SetupMinecraft and run it directly using curl so it grabs the latest version!
Hi James,
I thought I had, but looking through my command history looks like I maybe hadn’t, so that could have been the issue….
Hey Rob,
No worries, I would give it a go and if it works then that’s an easy fix at least!
I am getting an error on the new version.
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/MinecraftBedrockServer/master/SetupMinecraft.sh | bashBuilding dependency treeReading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package libcrypt1
Dependency installation completed
bash: line 82: syntax error near unexpected token else'
Hey Goretech,
I fixed that just a couple of minutes before you posted this. Can you give it another try?
Here is what I get when running the new SetupMinecraft.sh on Debian, which is what it was running just fine on prior:
Checking and installing dependencies..E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), are you root?
E: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend - open (13: Permission denied)
E: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), are you root?
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
libcurl4 is already the newest version (7.64.0-4+deb10u2).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
libc6 is already the newest version (2.28-10).
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
E: Unable to locate package libcrypt1
Dependency installation completed.
./SetupMinecraft.sh: line 91: syntax error near unexpected token
else'
./SetupMinecraft.sh: line 91:else'
james@dingbat:~$
Hey James,
Good catch, sorry it has been a long day and the changelog is getting really long so I was bound to make a mistake eventually. Can you give this another try? I’ve committed the fix!
Okay, it finished SetupMinecraft.sh now without error until the very end where it starts giving the error that the network device cannot be detected…. trying again…. The script finished but the server never started. When I run start.sh I get the same network device error around line 43. Did the start.sh script change regarding network devices?
Hey James,
That’s progress! I think I know what is happening. I just committed a fix that should get the network detection working on Debian again. Can you give it a try when you have a chance and let me know if that took care of it for you?
So far, so good. Thank you for all your work!
Although it seems to have maybe wiped out my world… I’ll look into it further or my kids will destroy me. LOL
I lied. It’s up and great – disregard my last inept comment. Hahaha
Hey James,
Don’t sweat it at all, thanks for bearing with me through multiple issues, I’m very glad it’s up and running!
oops, i met version Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS . I do sudo apt install curl, but then run the script, and it uninstalls libcurl4/curl, and installs libcurl3, but not curl, and the script then tries to download start.sh with curl but fails.
Got it, that is why I missed this, I am using Ubuntu 20.04 and if you try to install libcurl3 over the top it tells you a better package is already installed and won’t let you clobber it. It sounds like on 18.04 it actually does let you fully install the package and will actually remove curl itself through this dependency mess!
Fix is live on GitHub, thank you!
The install script using curl is removing curl and then it doesn’t fetch the start.sh. Ubuntu 19
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/TheRemote/MinecraftBedrockServer/master/SetupMinecraft.sh | bash% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 0Minecraft Bedrock Server installation script by James Chambers
Latest version always at https://github.com/TheRemote/MinecraftBedrockServer
Don't forget to set up port forwarding on your router! The default port is 19132
100 14915 100 14915 0 0 106k 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 106k
find: ‘SetupMinecraft.sh’: No such file or directory
Updating apt..
Hit:1 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic InRelease
Hit:2 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-security InRelease
Hit:3 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates InRelease
Hit:4 http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-backports InRelease
Hit:5 https://downloads.plex.tv/repo/deb public InRelease
Hit:6 http://ppa.launchpad.net/certbot/certbot/ubuntu bionic InRelease
Hit:7 https://packages.microsoft.com/ubuntu/19.04/prod disco InRelease
Reading package lists... Done
Checking and installing dependencies..
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
libcurl4 is already the newest version (7.58.0-2ubuntu3.13).
libcurl4 set to manually installed.
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
cmake-data libjsoncpp1 librhash0
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
cmake-data libjsoncpp1 librhash0
Use 'sudo apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following packages will be REMOVED:
curl libcurl4
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libcurl3
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 2 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0 B/214 kB of archives.
After this operation, 407 kB disk space will be freed.
(Reading database ... 148012 files and directories currently installed.)
Removing curl (7.58.0-2ubuntu3.13) ...
Hey Goretech,
Oh wow, that’s some unexpected behavior there. I’ve reworked it into this:
CurlVer=$(apt-cache show libcurl4 | grep Version | awk 'NR==1{ print $2 }')if [[ "$CurlVer" ]]; then
sudo apt-get install libcurl4 -y; fi
else
# Install libcurl3 for backwards compatibility in case libcurl4 isn't available
CurlVer=$(apt-cache show libcurl3 | grep Version | awk 'NR==1{ print $2 }')
if [[ "$CurlVer" ]]; then sudo apt-get install libcurl3 -y; fi
fi
Now if libcurl4 is already available/present it will not even look to see if libcurl3 is available in the repositories let alone attempt to install it. Thank you for reporting this, the fix is now live on GitHub!
Error on the second to last line of start.sh that was causing the server to fail startup.
strftime not defined error
I just commented out the line that contained “strftime” and it started.
But this is a fantastic set of scripts and I appreciate your time and effort in creating and maintaining it!
Hey Alex,
Thanks for the feedback and kind words! I actually have not heard of this before but I suspect it’s compatibility/portability related (the awk utility) between different distros. Can I ask which OS you are using? I’m assuming it’s not Ubuntu but I may need to make some adjustments if I did this in a non platform-independentish way.
I believe you’d be referring to these lines:
BASH_CMD="LD_LIBRARY_PATH=dirname/minecraftbe/servername dirname/minecraftbe/servername/bedrock_server"BASH_CMD+=$' | awk \'{ print strftime(\"[%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S]\"), $0 }\''
Basically if you comment out the strftime line all you are doing is disabling timestamps in the logs. I actually left these two lines broken up incidentally (it’s how it was committed in the Pull Request and I didn’t recombine them). I’d probably rather just do some research though and find a more portable function than strftime that does the same thing and knowing your distro will help a little with that.
Even though this guide is for Ubuntu I’ve always tried to keep it portable enough that it will run on just about anything (as long as they cover the few required packages that apt installed which are pretty easy to find if they aren’t already present).
I am wondering if your awk version is MAWK which comes with Debian for example. You may want to see if gawk can be installed as that could be a potential solution but as stated earlier I am working to find a way to do this that will work across distros.
I uploaded a new version that uses gawk instead if you’d like to try it (download SetupMinecraft.sh again and try running it, it should take care of the dependency unless you don’t have apt on your distro).
Thanks again for reporting this and I’m curious which distro it’s on!