Minecraft Bedrock Edition is the version of Minecraft that powers the iPhone / Android versions (formerly Minecraft Pocket Edition), the Xbox / PlayStation / Nintendo Switch editions and the free Windows 10 Minecraft edition.
Mojang has released a dedicated server which is considered to be in alpha testing. I have found it to be very stable and able to run on a wide variety of hardware.
This script and guide are written to help you get a robust Minecraft Bedrock dedicated server up and running in only a few minutes!
This is the standalone version. The easiest and most problem-free way to run this is using Docker (installed as simply as sudo apt install docker.io): Legendary Minecraft Bedrock Container
Sets up the official Minecraft Bedrock Server (currently in alpha testing)
Fully operational Minecraft Bedrock edition server in a couple of minutes
Ubuntu / Debian distributions supported
Sets up Minecraft as a system service with option to autostart at boot
Automatic backups when server restarts
Supports multiple instances — you can run multiple Bedrock servers on the same system
Updates automatically to the latest or user-defined version when server is started
Easy control of server with start.sh, stop.sh and restart.sh scripts
Adds logging with timestamps to “logs” directory
Optional scheduled daily restart of server using cron
Requirements
A computer with a 64 bit processor (if you are trying to use ARM read my article on the limitations). 32 bit binaries of the official server are not available so it needs to be 64 bit!
1 GB of RAM or higher
The only officially supported platform by Microsoft is Ubuntu 22.04 / 20.04 (current LTS, recommended)
Other Linux flavors supported by this script as well as long as they use systemd (for the service). The script assumes apt is installed but there are minimal dependencies so you could install these on another distro (that doesn’t have apt present) and use the script normally.
Recommended Gear
Game Editions
Minecraft: Bedrock Edition is the “Windows 10” version of Minecraft as well as the version of Minecraft on the Xbox / Playstation / Switch. The versions of Minecraft for Android and iOS are also the Bedrock edition.
All of these versions support cross-platform play with each other (but not with the Java edition).
Minecraft Bedrock Digital Code
This is the PC Minecraft for Windows 10 (Bedrock) edition of Minecraft. It is able to play cross-platform with other players on Android / iOS / Playstation / Xbox / Switch. Available as a code that is instantly activated to give you permanent access to the game!
I strongly recommend a Solid State drive (SSD) for your server. This is because Minecraft is constantly reading/storing chunks to the disk which makes I/O performance very important.
These are much cheaper than they used to be. Here’s a decent 120 GB one (higher capacity options are available) at a very low price:
Kingston A400 2.5″ SATA SSD
The Kingston A400 is reliable, widely available around the world, has low power requirements and performs very well. It’s also very affordable. This drive has been benchmarked over 1000 times at Pi Benchmarks and is the #1 most popular SSD among the community!
If you have a M.2 NVME slot in your motherboard you can go with a high end drive. This will give your server maximum performance even if a large number of players are running around on the server changing blocks and triggering disk writes.
This is the one I have in my machine. These range from 250 GB to 2 TB depending on how big your server might grow:
The Samsung 980 Pro (NVMe) is a professional grade SSD and one of the fastest in the world. The Samsung NVMe drives have been at the top of this category for a long time and are well trusted for both their performance and reliability / long life.
Almost any PC made in the last few years will be a x86_64 bit computer. If you have an older computer around that isn’t being used then it will most likely have the right CPU and amount of memory (as well as fast storage) to run a basic server.
Throwing a SSD in one of these older computers will provide an excellent server experience for small and larger player counts.
The speed of your storage will make the largest difference. Older HDDs are going to have significantly slower performance than any modern SSD even with all other hardware equal. This is because the Minecraft server is constantly reading/writing chunks of your world as well as updates to it to the disk so this tends to be the bottleneck.
Operating System
I highly recommend using Ubuntu Server to run the Minecraft dedicated server. It is available here.
At the time of writing the current version is Ubuntu Server 20.04. This is a secure and robust operating system and will leave plenty of resources available for the server to run.
The script should run on any Debian based flavor of Linux but since the Minecraft Bedrock server is compiled natively for Ubuntu I recommend sticking with it. If you have a GUI flavor of Ubuntu and a decent PC (>= 2 GB of RAM) the server will work just fine on it.
Note: People have reported in the comments that Ubuntu 16.x is no longer working with the latest official Mojang binaries. Ubuntu 18.04 is the minimum requirement for the latest versions, and 20.04 is recommended!
Installation
Log into your Linux server either using SSH or a mouse and keyboard and paste/type the following command:
The script will setup the Minecraft sever and ask you some questions on how to configure it. I’ll explain here what they mean.
The first question will be the installation path. This is the root installation path for ALL servers you will have. If you add additional servers later you should select the exact same installation path. It should always be left as the default (~).
The only exception is if you have something like a completely dedicated disk for the Minecraft server. In that case you should always use the same root path of /mnt/yourdrive or wherever the path is for every new/additional server you install.
“Start Minecraft server at startup automatically (y/n)?” – This will set the Minecraft service to start automatically when your server boots. This is a great option to set up a Minecraft server that is always available.
“Automatically restart and backup server at 4am daily (y/n)?” – This will add a cron job to the server that reboots the server every day at 4am. This is great because every time the server restarts it backs up the server and updates to the latest version. See the “Scheduled Daily Reboots” section below for information on how to customize the time or remove the reboot.
That is it for the setup script. The server will finish configuring and start!
First Run
The server will start up and start displaying output to the console.
Once you see the “Server started” line you will be able to connect from the client.
To add the server to the client open Minecraft and click “Play”. Then at the top of the screen select the “Servers” tab and click “Add Server”.
This will ask you for a Server Name and Server IP Address. For the name you can put anything and for the server IP address put the address of your Linux server. Leave the port as the default 19132. For more information on how to let people from outside your network on go to the “Port Forwarding” section below.
Now choose the server you just added in the list and connect!
Start, Stop and Restart Server
The server can be started, stopped and restarted two different ways. You can use the provided scripts in the Minecraft folder or you can use systemctl. Here are the commands:
The server backs up each time it starts. This helps you recover easily if something goes wrong. This system works best if you configured the server to restart daily since it means you will have a backup every day.
To access these backups type:
cd ~/minecraftbe/backups ls
When a backup is made the filename will be the date and time the backup was taken. If you need to restore a backup it’s very easy. Substitute the timestamp in my example to the backup you want to roll back to. Type:
cd ~/minecraftbe
./stop.sh
rm -rf worlds
tar -xf backups/2019.02.15.22.06.30.tar.gz
./start.sh
Your world has now been restored! It’s a good idea to download these backups off the server periodically just in case the server’s storage fails.
The daily reboots are scheduled using cron. It’s very easy to customize the time your server restarts.
To change the time that the server restarts type: crontab -e
This will open a window that will ask you to select a text editor (I find nano to be the easiest) and will show the cronjobs scheduled on the server. The Minecraft one will look like the following:
0 4 * * * /home/ubuntu/minecraftbe/restart.sh
Crontab’s syntax layout
There are 5 fields here. The default restart time is set to reboot at 0 minutes of the 4th hour of the day (4 AM). The other 3 fields are left as * to represent every day of every month. Make any desired changes here and press Ctrl+X to exit nano and update the cronjob.
To remove the daily reboot simply delete the line and save.
Reconfigure / Update Scripts
The scripts can always be reconfigured and updated by downloading the latest SetupMinecraft.sh and running the installer again. It will update all of the scripts in the Minecraft directory and reinstall the startup service for you.
Running SetupMinecraft.sh again will also give you a chance to reconfigure options such as the memory dedicated to the server, daily reboots, starting the server on boot, etc.
This will not overwrite your world or any other data so it is safe to run!
Port Forwarding
If everyone on your server is on the same LAN or WiFi network as you then you don’t need to do this. If you want people to connect from outside your local network then you need to set up port forwarding on your router.
The process for this is different for every router so the best thing to do is just look at your router and find the model # and put that in google with port forwarding for easy instructions on how to do it for your specific router.
You want to forward port 19132. The type of connection is both TCP and UDP. On some routers you need to do both a TCP entry and then a second entry as UDP.
Once you do this people will be able to connect to your Minecraft server through your public IP address. This is different than your local IP which is usually a 192.x.x.x or 10.x.x.x. If you don’t know what that is just go to google and type “what’s my ip” and Google will kindly tell you!
Version Override
You can revert to a previous version with the revert.sh script included in your directory like this:
james@jamesgigabyte-linux:~/minecraftbe/james$ ./revert.sh
Set previous version in version_pin.txt: bedrock-server-1.19.10.20.zip
If you have a specific version you would like to run you can also create version_pin.txt yourself like this:
The version hold can be removed by deleting version_pin.txt. This will allow it to update to the latest version again!
Wired vs. Wireless
Going with an ethernet (wired) connection is going to be faster and more reliable. There’s so much wireless traffic and other interference in the air that running your server on WiFi is not recommended.
Even if it is working great 99% of the time it can ruin your experience very quickly if the WiFi drops for a couple of seconds and you get blown up by a creeper!
All that being said, the server works fine on wireless. The script will work fine as is with a wireless connection.
Benchmarking / Testing Storage
If you’re getting poor performance you may want to run my storage benchmark with:
PC results won’t show up on the site yet (it’s meant for Raspberry Pi) but it will run on Linux just fine and give you a score. If you search for the model of your drive on Pi Benchmarks you can compare your score with others and make sure the drive is performing correctly!
Troubleshooting Note – Oracle Virtual Machines
A very common problem people have with the Oracle Virtual Machine tutorials out there that typically show you how to use a free VM is that the VM is much more difficult to configure than just about any other product / offering out there.
It is because there are several steps you need to take to open the ports on the Oracle VM. You need to both:
Set the ingress ports (TCP/UDP) in the Virtual Cloud Network (VCN) security list
*and* set the ingress ports in a Network Security Group assigned to your instance
Both of these settings are typically required before you will be able to connect to your VM instance. This is purely configuration related and has nothing to do with the script or the Minecraft server itself.
I do not recommend this platform due to the configuration difficulty but the people who have gone through the pain of configuring an Oracle VM have had good experiences with it after that point. Just keep in mind it’s going to be a rough ride through the configuration for most people.
Troubleshooting Note – Hyper-V
There is a weird bug in Hyper-V that breaks UDP connections on the Minecraft server. The fix for this is that you have to use a Generation 1 VM with the Legacy LAN network driver.
Conclusion
The Minecraft Bedrock Edition dedicated server runs much better than previous third party servers in the past that were missing critical features. The performance is very good even on low end hardware. It has never been easier to set up a Minecraft Bedrock server.
If you have any feedback or suggestions let me know in the comment section. A lot of the changes and developments in this script and guide are directly from readers.
1,529 thoughts on “Minecraft Bedrock Edition – Ubuntu Dedicated Server Guide”
ElkyBoy
Hi, I have a question!
I am going to install Your bedrock server on VPS, and I’d like to know what ports and protocols it uses (and if possible what IP addressess does it connect to), to configure my firewall?
Thank you in advance.
This is all described in the article / GitHub page. I’d advise reading it all before attempting to use this for sure. It’s also the exact same as all other Minecraft Bedrock servers so the answer should be to configure the platform the same way as you would for any Minecraft Bedrock server (which there’s a lot of documentation out there for as well).
Hi! Loving this!! Thank you so much! But i have two questions for you – i cant find the ops.json file to edit my op level… AND is it possible to convert my ps4 game world to this java server??? <3 hope you want/can help me with this.. total n00b in both minecraft server AND ubuntu server 😛 ………….. ………… ……….. ………….
Welcome! So the way I would recommend doing this is go into your server console after you start the server and type:
op yourplayername
This should immediately op that player. This is a way to not have to work with any of the files.
As far as converting the PS4 level to PC that is extremely hard. I think most people have to upload the server into “Realms” and then download it on PC. This question has been asked a bunch of times on reddit and there’s never really been a very good answer other than sending it to Realms. I’m pretty sure that isn’t even free though to send it to Realms. I’m guessing people buy the subscription for the minimal amount of time and then cancel it after they transfer it.
yeah i have OP¨ed me, but there are several levels(4)?
i have downloaded it on my pc, from realms (me and my son plays <3) but want to save the money from now on 😛
Excellent, that is fantastic news! So the LAN part is completely outside of my control. There’s a few reasons this could be happening. First of all you need to open the ports on your router via port forwarding.
Second you need to be using a provider that will actually let you open ports from the internet to your house. It’s very common to have internet providers that don’t allow this. Any type of shared apartment / living situation typically will be restricted. Any connections that use 4G/5G or any type of wireless technology are also restricted by default. This can typically be fixed with a call to your ISP if they are the ones blocking the ports.
Third it depends on what OS you are running. If you are running Ubuntu Linux and have ufw (universal firewall) installed you’d need to open the ports on your firewall. This will be different for everyone depending on what operating system they have installed and whether a firewall is installed/enabled or not.
Fourth they need to be connecting to your public IP address (not 192.168.X.X). This one I’d imagine you know but I figured I’d mention it as the public and private IPs can actually get pretty confusing sometimes. The public IP would be what it says if you open a browser to icanhazip.com.
The good news is that there’s nothing more you need to do with the script to fix that issue. It’s going to be purely with your network and firewalls to make sure that the port is open and it will be different for everyone depending on their ISP/equipment for sure. Hopefully that helps!
That makes sense. This has the exact same files for sure. You can edit server.properties in the same way.
My guess is that your connection to Microsoft is being blocked and that you are setting online-mode=false in server.properties on the other server that is working. Does that sound familiar? Whenever I get a really perplexing issue like this I have to always remind myself it’s that weird online-mode setting. You’ll have to do the exact same thing for this one.
The file for this one should be located at /home/youruser/minecraftbe/yourserver/server.properties. It works identically to everything you’ve used before. There’s nothing special about these scripts or different from the previous Minecraft server you were running. All of the networking/security is pure Minecraft and network-level configuration for sure.
It sounds like you’re getting very close here, hopefully that helps!
Have you ever considered adding a web GUI that can be used to view what is normally displayed in the terminal in terms of players joining and other pertinent info? I have mine running on a home server and it’d be great to just be able to sign in from any device to a specific port number and see all my server info super quick.
I’ve definitely thought about it and the thing that stopped me was that for most of my versions you can run Spigot / Paper / Bukkit add-ons. There’s a ton of add-ons that do this for you essentially for the Java versions.
For Bedrock though you’re right that it would make a lot more sense. It would be tricky to do this in practice.
You know what the best way to do this might be? Probably just running a simple web server that maps to your logs directory would do it. For example in Linux you could do:
cd /home/youruser/minecraftbe/yourserver/logs
python3 -m http.server 8000
Now if you connect to your server IP on port 8000 in your web browser (such as 192.168.1.1:8000) you should see the logs folder. If you open latest.log that is basically what you are looking for. It’s all of the terminal activity. That would be an easy way to do this without any plugins at least.
It won’t let them navigate outside of the logs folder so it should be safe. I wouldn’t port forward the port from the outside nonetheless but this should let you set something like this up right away if you’d like to. Hopefully that helps!
sudo do-release-upgrade or downloading the latest version from the Ubuntu web site and installing it fresh.
It’s going to be a big update and take a while. That’s a very old version. That hasn’t been the latest version of LTS since April 2022 so you’re going to have 1000+ packages to upgrade I’d estimate.
It says the server is starting but then when I do screen it does not show
knoalex@ubuntu:~/minecraftbe/TheBois$ ./start.sh
Backing up server (to minecraftbe/TheBois/backups folder)
Backing up server (multiple cores) to minecraftbe/TheBois/backups folder
worlds/
worlds/Bedrock level/
worlds/Bedrock level/db/
worlds/Bedrock level/db/CURRENT
worlds/Bedrock level/db/MANIFEST-000006
worlds/Bedrock level/db/000007.log
Checking for the latest version of Minecraft Bedrock server ...
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 319k 0 319k 0 0 545k 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 545k
Latest version online is bedrock-server-1.19.51.01.zip
Current install is: bedrock-server-1.19.51.01.zip
Latest version bedrock-server-1.19.51.01.zip is already installed
Starting Minecraft server. To view window type screen -r TheBois
To minimize the window and let the server run in the background, press Ctrl+A then Ctrl+D
knoalex@ubuntu:~/minecraftbe/TheBois$ screen -r TheBois
There is no screen to be resumed matching TheBois.
knoalex@ubuntu:~/minecraftbe/TheBois$ ^C
knoalex@ubuntu:~/minecraftbe/TheBois$
Can you go to the /minecraftbe/TheBois/logs folder and see what the log file says inside? Everything looks okay in the log you’re sharing so the problem must be happening after that.
We should be able to tell what is going on from those for sure!
Is this a brand new server or was it previously working? If it was previously working you may need to restore from a backup. You should also try starting a brand new server to see if it doesn’t crash. This will tell you whether it’s your server data files that are corrupted or not. If it won’t work still on a brand new server then it’s definitely the system / OS.
If it was never working it’s likely you aren’t running the latest version of Ubuntu. Can you share your:
uname -a
cat /etc/os-release
I doubt it still works on old versions like 20.04. Bedrock edition is definitely sensitive to running the absolute latest version of the OS.
Let’s take a look at those and see if we can get it going here!
The OS is too old to run Bedrock unfortunately. It needs to be upgraded to 22.04 at the very least (the current LTS version).
You could probably upgrade it with sudo do-release-upgrade but I wouldn’t if it’s a brand new server. If it’s a dedicated server or VPS it should let you select a newer version of Ubuntu to provision it with.
If it’s not going to be easy to install the current 22.04 LTS by reimaging then I would definitely recommend the sudo do-release-upgrade. Nothing should go too wrong if it’s a new server with a stock configuration. It’s usually machines that have been running for a while or have been upgraded before from even older versions that have upgraded trouble. You can basically get around this with a CLI upgrade though which should work for a fresh server.
Try restarting the machine. It says the port is already in use. I would also try screen -r again. It looks like it’s already running to me but if you don’t see it a reboot should fix it.
Hi James,
maybe a boring question but i just need to know 🙂
I have two bedrock servers running, anything is perfect. a friend of mine wants to join us but he played always on java. can yo u tell me what do i have to do to let him also join my two servers to let us have a wonderful evening and play together ?
i’m exiting to read you (always long an detailed) answers 🙂
That’s a great question! My Docker version can do this but it is a Java server that lets Bedrock players join and play. This container here automatically has Geyser and Floodgate installed so that both Java and Bedrock players can join it without it needing anything else (and it “just works”).
Unfortunately this is (currently) impossible the other way around. The Bedrock server does not have plugins and cannot be extended to do this. You can’t install a Geyser.jar / Floodgate.jar for Bedrock basically. The only way to do it is by hosting a Java server (which lets you install plugins) then you can install Geyser and Floodgate if that makes sense.
It has a lot to do with the differences between how Java and C/C++ work. Microsoft/Mojang never intended for people to make the modifications to the Java server either but Java is just fundamentally a lot easier to work with and modify in this way than a compiled C/C++ program. It would still be possible to create modding tools like this for the Bedrock version (people have been modding C/C++ games against the publisher’s will for as long as I can remember and surely even before that). It’s just an order of magnitude more difficult (at least) especially against the publisher’s will as there is a lot they can do to make this miserable they can’t do with Java.
The Java version has also been around a lot longer and some of these tools have history going back to before the Bedrock version was ever conceived so there’s a lot more momentum and just time for the tools to be developed for Java as well. It’s a consequence of the history of the game with Bedrock being the younger sibling and having been around for a lot less time for people to make tools (even putting aside that it’s much more difficult to do with C++ than Java). In other words there’s several things going against it that have left the modding/tools selection for Bedrock pretty poor to this day.
I know this is bad news overall. I honestly recommend for anyone starting a new server to actually use the Java server (even if everyone playing is going to be using Bedrock). The reason is simply that you can install plugins in Java and you can’t in Bedrock. Geyser / Floodgate makes it not matter that it’s a Java server instead of a “real” Bedrock server.
It also runs so much better on ARM and other architectures outside x86_64 (one of the strengths of Java). There’s pretty much no downside to running a Java server with Geyser+Floodgate and anyone will be able to play it. The reverse isn’t true though so that’s definitely a strike against running Bedrock in the first place now that the Geyser/Floodgate option is considered pretty universally to be fantastic to the point where most people will not be able to tell. If you have a lot of work into a server it’s not easy to just switch unfortunately but maybe that will change.
It will feel almost indistinguishable and there’s actually a behavior pack you can install for Geyser (that Bedrock clients will download) to make it actually indistinguishable. The behavior pack corrects a list of tiny glitches like particle effects not looking exactly the same and minor things like that. There’s a list of them here. They are almost all particle effects and animations. I never bother to install it but it may matter to some people so I figured I’d mention you can make it nearly 100% perfect using the behavior pack for perfectionists (or servers that are doing activities that would be understandably impacted more by the list of specific bugs).
I wonder if someone has made a way to convert a Bedrock level to a Java level. It would probably be quite a pain and the inventory and all of that would have to be converted as well. Maybe that’s impossible but theoretically if there is a way to convert them you could simply convert to a Java world and run it that way.
It feels essentially the same to run the Docker version except it’s safer and more secure since Docker is a virtualization layer that protects you if more Minecraft exploits are found (hasn’t been as big of a problem for Bedrock but has for Java in the past as everyone knows for sure). I actually have a Docker version of this container as well that is still for Bedrock. You could upgrade to that but it can’t install Geyser or Floodgate on it since that’s impossible with Bedrock so it wouldn’t really help with this immediate issue very much.
Hi, I have a question!
I am going to install Your bedrock server on VPS, and I’d like to know what ports and protocols it uses (and if possible what IP addressess does it connect to), to configure my firewall?
Thank you in advance.
Hey ElkyBoy,
This is all described in the article / GitHub page. I’d advise reading it all before attempting to use this for sure. It’s also the exact same as all other Minecraft Bedrock servers so the answer should be to configure the platform the same way as you would for any Minecraft Bedrock server (which there’s a lot of documentation out there for as well).
Hopefully that helps!
Hi! Loving this!! Thank you so much! But i have two questions for you – i cant find the ops.json file to edit my op level… AND is it possible to convert my ps4 game world to this java server??? <3 hope you want/can help me with this.. total n00b in both minecraft server AND ubuntu server 😛 ………….. ………… ……….. ………….
Hey Ostehovelen,
Welcome! So the way I would recommend doing this is go into your server console after you start the server and type:
op yourplayernameThis should immediately op that player. This is a way to not have to work with any of the files.
As far as converting the PS4 level to PC that is extremely hard. I think most people have to upload the server into “Realms” and then download it on PC. This question has been asked a bunch of times on reddit and there’s never really been a very good answer other than sending it to Realms. I’m pretty sure that isn’t even free though to send it to Realms. I’m guessing people buy the subscription for the minimal amount of time and then cancel it after they transfer it.
Hopefully that helps!
yeah i have OP¨ed me, but there are several levels(4)?
i have downloaded it on my pc, from realms (me and my son plays <3) but want to save the money from now on 😛
I GOT IT TO WORK!!! I figured out what i did wrong 😀 woohoo…
BUT, i cant get it to work online – i can only play on LAN… :/ wanted this server to be for all his friends too
Hey Ostehovelen,
Excellent, that is fantastic news! So the LAN part is completely outside of my control. There’s a few reasons this could be happening. First of all you need to open the ports on your router via port forwarding.
Second you need to be using a provider that will actually let you open ports from the internet to your house. It’s very common to have internet providers that don’t allow this. Any type of shared apartment / living situation typically will be restricted. Any connections that use 4G/5G or any type of wireless technology are also restricted by default. This can typically be fixed with a call to your ISP if they are the ones blocking the ports.
Third it depends on what OS you are running. If you are running Ubuntu Linux and have ufw (universal firewall) installed you’d need to open the ports on your firewall. This will be different for everyone depending on what operating system they have installed and whether a firewall is installed/enabled or not.
Fourth they need to be connecting to your public IP address (not 192.168.X.X). This one I’d imagine you know but I figured I’d mention it as the public and private IPs can actually get pretty confusing sometimes. The public IP would be what it says if you open a browser to icanhazip.com.
The good news is that there’s nothing more you need to do with the script to fix that issue. It’s going to be purely with your network and firewalls to make sure that the port is open and it will be different for everyone depending on their ISP/equipment for sure. Hopefully that helps!
I have had another Minecraft server up and running online, but I had to change settings in server. File.
All ports are open both in Ubuntu 20.4 and router
Hey Ostehovelen,
That makes sense. This has the exact same files for sure. You can edit server.properties in the same way.
My guess is that your connection to Microsoft is being blocked and that you are setting online-mode=false in server.properties on the other server that is working. Does that sound familiar? Whenever I get a really perplexing issue like this I have to always remind myself it’s that weird online-mode setting. You’ll have to do the exact same thing for this one.
The file for this one should be located at /home/youruser/minecraftbe/yourserver/server.properties. It works identically to everything you’ve used before. There’s nothing special about these scripts or different from the previous Minecraft server you were running. All of the networking/security is pure Minecraft and network-level configuration for sure.
It sounds like you’re getting very close here, hopefully that helps!
Hey James,
Have you ever considered adding a web GUI that can be used to view what is normally displayed in the terminal in terms of players joining and other pertinent info? I have mine running on a home server and it’d be great to just be able to sign in from any device to a specific port number and see all my server info super quick.
Hey Thurm,
I’ve definitely thought about it and the thing that stopped me was that for most of my versions you can run Spigot / Paper / Bukkit add-ons. There’s a ton of add-ons that do this for you essentially for the Java versions.
For Bedrock though you’re right that it would make a lot more sense. It would be tricky to do this in practice.
You know what the best way to do this might be? Probably just running a simple web server that maps to your logs directory would do it. For example in Linux you could do:
cd /home/youruser/minecraftbe/yourserver/logspython3 -m http.server 8000
Now if you connect to your server IP on port 8000 in your web browser (such as 192.168.1.1:8000) you should see the logs folder. If you open latest.log that is basically what you are looking for. It’s all of the terminal activity. That would be an easy way to do this without any plugins at least.
It won’t let them navigate outside of the logs folder so it should be safe. I wouldn’t port forward the port from the outside nonetheless but this should let you set something like this up right away if you’d like to. Hopefully that helps!
How would I update it?
sudo do-release-upgradeor downloading the latest version from the Ubuntu web site and installing it fresh.It’s going to be a big update and take a while. That’s a very old version. That hasn’t been the latest version of LTS since April 2022 so you’re going to have 1000+ packages to upgrade I’d estimate.
It says the server is starting but then when I do screen it does not show
knoalex@ubuntu:~/minecraftbe/TheBois$ ./start.shBacking up server (to minecraftbe/TheBois/backups folder)
Backing up server (multiple cores) to minecraftbe/TheBois/backups folder
worlds/
worlds/Bedrock level/
worlds/Bedrock level/db/
worlds/Bedrock level/db/CURRENT
worlds/Bedrock level/db/MANIFEST-000006
worlds/Bedrock level/db/000007.log
Checking for the latest version of Minecraft Bedrock server ...
% Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current
Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed
100 319k 0 319k 0 0 545k 0 --:--:-- --:--:-- --:--:-- 545k
Latest version online is bedrock-server-1.19.51.01.zip
Current install is: bedrock-server-1.19.51.01.zip
Latest version bedrock-server-1.19.51.01.zip is already installed
Starting Minecraft server. To view window type screen -r TheBois
To minimize the window and let the server run in the background, press Ctrl+A then Ctrl+D
knoalex@ubuntu:~/minecraftbe/TheBois$ screen -r TheBois
There is no screen to be resumed matching TheBois.
knoalex@ubuntu:~/minecraftbe/TheBois$ ^C
knoalex@ubuntu:~/minecraftbe/TheBois$
Hey Alex,
Can you go to the /minecraftbe/TheBois/logs folder and see what the log file says inside? Everything looks okay in the log you’re sharing so the problem must be happening after that.
We should be able to tell what is going on from those for sure!
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] [2023-01-31 22:21:40:656 INFO] Server stop requested.terminate called without an active exception
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] [2023-01-31 22:21:40:721 INFO] Package: com.mojang.minecraft.dedicatedserver
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] Version: 1.19.51.01
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] OS: Linux
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] Server start: 2023-01-31 22:21:39 UTC
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] Dmp timestamp: 2023-01-31 22:21:40 UTC
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] Upload Date: 2023-01-31 22:21:40 UTC
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] Session ID: 0b06a322-de51-45c2-859c-866cee5ba1ed
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] Commit hash: 72eeba9aa0f20a54ad0d96cc6dfc7cd7f015afb4
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] Build id: 12894682
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] CrashReporter Key: 609111ac-c9a0-3307-9dc8-c2dea267a689
[2023-01-31 22:21:40]
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] Crash
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] [2023-01-31 22:21:40:721 INFO] at gsignal (UnknownFile:?)
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] at abort (UnknownFile:?)
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] at __libc_start_main (UnknownFile:?)
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] b980cf72-2c63-4ed4-b51f-f2fe29a74682
Hey Alex,
Is this a brand new server or was it previously working? If it was previously working you may need to restore from a backup. You should also try starting a brand new server to see if it doesn’t crash. This will tell you whether it’s your server data files that are corrupted or not. If it won’t work still on a brand new server then it’s definitely the system / OS.
If it was never working it’s likely you aren’t running the latest version of Ubuntu. Can you share your:
uname -acat /etc/os-release
I doubt it still works on old versions like 20.04. Bedrock edition is definitely sensitive to running the absolute latest version of the OS.
Let’s take a look at those and see if we can get it going here!
This is a brand new server
Linux ubuntu 5.4.0-137-generic #154-Ubuntu SMP Thu Jan 5 17:03:22 UTC 2023 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/LinuxNAME="Ubuntu"
VERSION="20.04.5 LTS (Focal Fossa)"
ID=ubuntu
ID_LIKE=debian
PRETTY_NAME="Ubuntu 20.04.5 LTS"
VERSION_ID="20.04"
HOME_URL="https://www.ubuntu.com/"
SUPPORT_URL="https://help.ubuntu.com/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/"
PRIVACY_POLICY_URL="https://www.ubuntu.com/legal/terms-and-policies/privacy-policy"
VERSION_CODENAME=focal
UBUNTU_CODENAME=focal
Hey Alex,
The OS is too old to run Bedrock unfortunately. It needs to be upgraded to 22.04 at the very least (the current LTS version).
You could probably upgrade it with
sudo do-release-upgradebut I wouldn’t if it’s a brand new server. If it’s a dedicated server or VPS it should let you select a newer version of Ubuntu to provision it with.If it’s not going to be easy to install the current 22.04 LTS by reimaging then I would definitely recommend the
sudo do-release-upgrade. Nothing should go too wrong if it’s a new server with a stock configuration. It’s usually machines that have been running for a while or have been upgraded before from even older versions that have upgraded trouble. You can basically get around this with a CLI upgrade though which should work for a fresh server.Hopefully that helps!
After I updated it it still does not work and has this log.
[2023-01-31 22:21:39] NO LOG FILE! - setting up server logging...[2023-01-31 22:21:39] [2023-01-31 22:21:39:263 INFO] Starting Server
[2023-01-31 22:21:39] [2023-01-31 22:21:39:263 INFO] Version 1.19.51.01
[2023-01-31 22:21:39] [2023-01-31 22:21:39:263 INFO] Session ID 0b06a322-de51-45c2-859c-866cee5ba1ed
[2023-01-31 22:21:39] [2023-01-31 22:21:39:264 INFO] Level Name: Bedrock level
[2023-01-31 22:21:39] [2023-01-31 22:21:39:339 INFO] Game mode: 0 Survival
[2023-01-31 22:21:39] [2023-01-31 22:21:39:339 INFO] Difficulty: 1 EASY
[2023-01-31 22:21:39] [2023-01-31 22:21:39:438 INFO] opening worlds/Bedrock level/db
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] [2023-01-31 22:21:40:656 ERROR] Network port occupied, can't start server.
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] [2023-01-31 22:21:40:656 INFO] Server stop requested.
terminate called without an active exception
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] [2023-01-31 22:21:40:721 INFO] Package: com.mojang.minecraft.dedicatedserver
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] Version: 1.19.51.01
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] OS: Linux
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] Server start: 2023-01-31 22:21:39 UTC
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] Dmp timestamp: 2023-01-31 22:21:40 UTC
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] Upload Date: 2023-01-31 22:21:40 UTC
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] Session ID: 0b06a322-de51-45c2-859c-866cee5ba1ed
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] Commit hash: 72eeba9aa0f20a54ad0d96cc6dfc7cd7f015afb4
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] Build id: 12894682
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] CrashReporter Key: 609111ac-c9a0-3307-9dc8-c2dea267a689
[2023-01-31 22:21:40]
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] Crash
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] [2023-01-31 22:21:40:721 INFO] at gsignal (UnknownFile:?)
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] at abort (UnknownFile:?)
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] at __libc_start_main (UnknownFile:?)
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] b980cf72-2c63-4ed4-b51f-f2fe29a74682
Hey Alex,
This one says:
[2023-01-31 22:21:40] [2023-01-31 22:21:40:656 ERROR] Network port occupied, can't start server.Try restarting the machine. It says the port is already in use. I would also try screen -r again. It looks like it’s already running to me but if you don’t see it a reboot should fix it.
Hopefully that helps!
how do I find the ip of the server
Hey jack,
It will be the same as the Linux machine you are running it on. Probably the easiest way to see it is:
sudo ifconfigYou can also log into your router and you should see which IP is assigned to the machine hosting the server. Hopefully that helps!
Hi James,
maybe a boring question but i just need to know 🙂
I have two bedrock servers running, anything is perfect. a friend of mine wants to join us but he played always on java. can yo u tell me what do i have to do to let him also join my two servers to let us have a wonderful evening and play together ?
i’m exiting to read you (always long an detailed) answers 🙂
Eike from Ger
Hey Eike,
That’s a great question! My Docker version can do this but it is a Java server that lets Bedrock players join and play. This container here automatically has Geyser and Floodgate installed so that both Java and Bedrock players can join it without it needing anything else (and it “just works”).
Unfortunately this is (currently) impossible the other way around. The Bedrock server does not have plugins and cannot be extended to do this. You can’t install a Geyser.jar / Floodgate.jar for Bedrock basically. The only way to do it is by hosting a Java server (which lets you install plugins) then you can install Geyser and Floodgate if that makes sense.
It has a lot to do with the differences between how Java and C/C++ work. Microsoft/Mojang never intended for people to make the modifications to the Java server either but Java is just fundamentally a lot easier to work with and modify in this way than a compiled C/C++ program. It would still be possible to create modding tools like this for the Bedrock version (people have been modding C/C++ games against the publisher’s will for as long as I can remember and surely even before that). It’s just an order of magnitude more difficult (at least) especially against the publisher’s will as there is a lot they can do to make this miserable they can’t do with Java.
The Java version has also been around a lot longer and some of these tools have history going back to before the Bedrock version was ever conceived so there’s a lot more momentum and just time for the tools to be developed for Java as well. It’s a consequence of the history of the game with Bedrock being the younger sibling and having been around for a lot less time for people to make tools (even putting aside that it’s much more difficult to do with C++ than Java). In other words there’s several things going against it that have left the modding/tools selection for Bedrock pretty poor to this day.
I know this is bad news overall. I honestly recommend for anyone starting a new server to actually use the Java server (even if everyone playing is going to be using Bedrock). The reason is simply that you can install plugins in Java and you can’t in Bedrock. Geyser / Floodgate makes it not matter that it’s a Java server instead of a “real” Bedrock server.
It also runs so much better on ARM and other architectures outside x86_64 (one of the strengths of Java). There’s pretty much no downside to running a Java server with Geyser+Floodgate and anyone will be able to play it. The reverse isn’t true though so that’s definitely a strike against running Bedrock in the first place now that the Geyser/Floodgate option is considered pretty universally to be fantastic to the point where most people will not be able to tell. If you have a lot of work into a server it’s not easy to just switch unfortunately but maybe that will change.
It will feel almost indistinguishable and there’s actually a behavior pack you can install for Geyser (that Bedrock clients will download) to make it actually indistinguishable. The behavior pack corrects a list of tiny glitches like particle effects not looking exactly the same and minor things like that. There’s a list of them here. They are almost all particle effects and animations. I never bother to install it but it may matter to some people so I figured I’d mention you can make it nearly 100% perfect using the behavior pack for perfectionists (or servers that are doing activities that would be understandably impacted more by the list of specific bugs).
I wonder if someone has made a way to convert a Bedrock level to a Java level. It would probably be quite a pain and the inventory and all of that would have to be converted as well. Maybe that’s impossible but theoretically if there is a way to convert them you could simply convert to a Java world and run it that way.
It feels essentially the same to run the Docker version except it’s safer and more secure since Docker is a virtualization layer that protects you if more Minecraft exploits are found (hasn’t been as big of a problem for Bedrock but has for Java in the past as everyone knows for sure). I actually have a Docker version of this container as well that is still for Bedrock. You could upgrade to that but it can’t install Geyser or Floodgate on it since that’s impossible with Bedrock so it wouldn’t really help with this immediate issue very much.
Hopefully that helps!