Minecraft 1.17 (Caves and Cliffs Update) is here! This script and guide are written to help you get a great performing Raspberry Pi Minecraft server up and running in only a few minutes.
This is the standalone version. It runs on most flavors of Linux and should work on most architectures as well (arm, aarch64, etc.).
I highly recommend using Docker over the standalone version for most people. Installing Docker is as simple as sudo apt install docker.io. There are 3 Docker options available:
Sets up Minecraft as a system service with option to autostart at boot
Automatic backups to minecraft/backups when server restarts
Updates automatically to the latest version when server is started
Easy control of server with start.sh, stop.sh and restart.sh scripts
Optional scheduled daily restart of Pi using cron
Requirements
Raspberry Pi model with 1 GB of RAM or higher. Basically a Raspberry Pi 2B or higher. (No Zero unfortunately, 512MB is not enough RAM to do this, I’ve tried!)
Headless Linux distribution such as Raspbian Buster Lite, Ubuntu Server 18.04.2, or any Debian based distribution (GUI distros can be used at the expense of available RAM and server performance)
Solid state drive highly recommended but not required. You can get a SSD setup on a Pi for less than most Micro SD cards cost. See my article here for details
The Raspberry Pi 4 is available in different memory configurations all the way up to 8 GB. It’s about the size of a credit card and uses an extremely low amount of power making it ideal for all sorts of projects and ideas!
The Raspberry Pi 400 kit includes everything you need for a full Pi 400 desktop build. The Pi 400 is the fastest Raspberry Pi ever released and comes in the form factor of a keyboard!
The Kingston A400 has been a great drive to use with the Pi for years. It’s reliable, widely available around the world, has low power requirements and performs very well. It’s also very affordable. This drive has been benchmarked over 1000 times at pibenchmarks.com and is the #1 most popular SSD among the Pi community!
The USB 3.1 variant of the StarTech 2.5″ SATA adapter works well with the Pi 4. The USB 3.0 variant doesn’t have firmware updates available and is not recommended.
The SanDisk Extreme A1-A2 SD card has the best scoring SD card on Pi Benchmarks for years and is second in popularity only to the SanDisk Ultra (often included in combo kits). The application class (A1) means random I/O speeds (very important when running an OS) have to meet a higher standard. There’s no benefit on the Pi for A2 right now so get whichever is cheaper/available.
The most important consideration when choosing which flavor of Linux to run the server on is simple: available RAM. Headless Linux distributions such as Raspbian Lite that don’t have a built in GUI have
Our biggest obstacle when running a Minecraft server on the Pi is available RAM since 1 GB is extremely low for this type of server. To have a playable experience you should not be running anything else on the Pi so all memory is available to be used.
After testing on many different distros I am finding Raspbian Lite and Ubuntu Server 18.04.4 32-bit to be the best choices. These distributions come with very few background processes and have rock solid support and performance.
64-bit vs 32-bit
There’s a lot of discussion in the Pi world about the up and coming aarch64 64-bit distributions vs. armhf 32-bit distributions. They have been and continue to improve dramatically. There are already use cases where 64-bit is far superior such as video encoding, advanced compression, etc.
So how about for running a Minecraft server? I have been testing extensively with Ubuntu Server 18.04 64-bit and the Debian Buster 64-bit. I have consistently had worse performance and stability than on 32-bit versions of the exact same distros.
But how can that be? It’s certainly true that Minecraft servers benefit in CPU performance from 64-bit versions of Java. The answer is actually incredibly simple: memory. The server running on a 64-bit Java Virtual Machine uses a minimum of about 100 MB more memory. This makes perfect sense because 64 bits > 32 bits by definition!
The Raspberry Pi’s 1 GB of memory has been the biggest obstacle for this project since the very beginning. Back when I first went into the Paper Minecraft developer IRC room and told them what I was trying to do I was practically laughed out of the chat room for even thinking of trying this. Most Minecraft server branches including vanilla can’t even start on the Pi because of the limited memory.
For a dedicated Minecraft server on the Pi I very highly recommend staying 32-bit. You will have more available memory which means it will be much faster and more stable. Since memory is our bottleneck the increased CPU throughput does not help us and losing *any* of our memory is disastrous!
If the Raspberry Pi 4 has more memory like we all expect it to this recommendation will change completely. Even 2 GB of memory would make the extra memory that 64-bit uses a non-issue and the CPU throughput performance gains very desirable. For now though stay 32-bit for a Minecraft server!
Tested Distributions
Raspberry Pi OS – It’s Raspbian. It has very low memory usage and is the official distribution of the Raspberry Pi. The server runs very well on this. It’s overall the best choice. The Buster release has made OpenJDK 11 available on it so it’s no longer behind the rest of the distros.
Ubuntu Server 18.04 / 20.04 – Ubuntu Server is my favorite Linux distro. I use it for nearly all of my projects. The performance of the 32-bit armhf version is on par with Raspbian. It’s a great choice! Click here for my Ubuntu setup guide for Raspberry Pi. The 64-bit version is not a fantastic choice and not recommended because of the higher memory usage. Stick with 32-bit and you’ll be a happy camper with Ubuntu Server.
Debian Buster 64-bit – Debian is the distribution Raspbian is based on. This version is a preview of Debian “Buster” which is the successor to Stretch and will be the next version of Raspbian when it is released. I like this distribution but it is currently still unofficial and unsupported. Performance and stability was less than Ubuntu and Raspbian.
Minecraft Server Installation
SSH into your Raspberry Pi and paste the following commands:
The script will setup the Minecraft sever and ask you some questions on how to configure it. I’ll explain here what they mean.
“Enter amount of memory in megabytes to dedicate to the Minecraft server” – The amount of memory that will be dedicated to the Minecraft server. The more the better, but you must leave some room for the operating system background processes.
If you exceed the total available memory either the server will crash or the Pi will get incredibly slow to the point where your SSH session will start timing out. The setup script will make a recommendation to you which is your available memory – 10% for headroom. If you aren’t sure what to put just go with the recommended amount.
Note for Raspberry Pi 4: Currently on 32-bit Raspbian 2700 MB is the maximum that Linux will let us allocate in a 32 bit environment. The script has been updated to check for this as the server will not start if it is set over 2700M on a 32 bit server. 64 bit operating systems will be able to allocate all available memory as Pi 4 support rolls out for them.
“Start Minecraft server at startup automatically (y/n)?” – This will set the Minecraft service to start automatically when your Pi boots. This is great because whenever you want to play you can just plug it in and go without having to SSH in.
“Automatically reboot Pi and update server at 4am daily (y/n)?” – This will add a cron job to the server that reboots the Pi 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!
Check Java Version
Sometimes if you have multiple versions of Java installed the wrong version of Java will be selected as the default. If the server didn’t start check that the right version of Java is selected with this command:
sudo update-alternatives --config java
If you get the message “update-alternatives: error: no alternatives for java” then you only have one version of Java installed and can skip to the next section.
If you are presented with a list of choices then your machine has multiple versions of Java installed. It will look like this:
update-alternatives: warning: /etc/alternatives/java has been changed (manually or by a script); switching to manual updates only
There are 2 choices for the alternative java (providing /usr/bin/java).
Selection Path Priority Status
------------------------------------------------------------
0 /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64/bin/java 1101 auto mode
1 /usr/lib/jvm/java-11-openjdk-amd64/bin/java 1101 manual mode
2 /usr/lib/jvm/java-8-openjdk-amd64/jre/bin/java 1081 manual mode
You will usually want to just select the newest version of OpenJDK that is listed so you would type 0 and press enter. In some cases on some platforms you may want to switch to the official Oracle JDK although I strongly recommend sticking with OpenJDK!
First Run
The first time you run the server it will take a little longer to start since it is generating all the server data. If you try to log in before it fully starts you will get a connection timeout error. Watch for the line: “Timings Reset”. This is the last line that prints when the server is ready to rock and roll. At this point you will be able to connect successfully.
The very first time you log into the server it will be slow for about 1-2 minutes. This is because since nobody has logged in before the server has to scramble to generate all the chunks within your view distance (10 by default) and send them to you/store them. During this time you may not be able to see very far and if you try to destroy blocks there will be noticeable lag from when they break to when they actually disappear.
Don’t panic! This will go away within a couple of minutes as the Pi catches up with all the first time login stuff it needs to do. Performance stabilizes and it will feel very much like the offline experience after that.
If you are hosting for a few friends I’d recommend logging in for the first time right after you set up the server instead of having several people nail a blank server at first startup. This gets it out of the way and when everyone is ready to log in the starting area chunks will be fully fleshed out and the Pi just has to read them. It’s an order of magnitude faster for the Pi to read chunks than to generate and store chunks.
In my experience after the initial login exploring new parts of the server doesn’t cause any lag even though new chunks are being generated. The reason for this is that when you’re walking it’s really only having to generate a new chunk as you get close to the border instead of a huge square area of chunks in all directions and all at the same time like during the first login.
Benchmarking / Testing Storage
If you’re getting poor performance or just want to verify everything is working correctly you may want to run my storage benchmark with:
Now press Ctrl+X to exit nano and answer “y” to save. Now let’s run the script:
chmod +x SetupMinecraft.sh ./SetupMinecraft.sh
And the setup will run and install the version of Minecraft you set at the top of the file!
Changing Minecraft Client Version
If you are wisely running the “stable” branch instead of the “development” branch there will be times where you need to select the version of Minecraft to run otherwise you will get an error message that your client is outdated when you try to log in.
Fortunately this is very easy. Open up the Minecraft launcher and instead of hitting “Play” choose “Launch Options” in the menu at the top of the window. It will look like this:
Minecraft Launcher “Launch Options” Tab
Click the “Add new” button and pick which version you want to add. You can optionally gave it a name or just click save.
Now when you go back to the “News” tab you will see a dropdown arrow where you can select which version of Minecraft you want to play!
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 ~/minecraft/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 ~/minecraft
./stop.sh
rm -rf world world_nether world_the_end
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 Pi periodically just in case the Pi’s storage fails.
Scheduled Daily Reboots
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 Pi. The Minecraft one will look like the following:
0 4 * * * /home/ubuntu/minecraft/restart.sh
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.
Installing Mods / Plugins
The server supports plugins that are compatible with Bukkit / Spigot / Paper. A popular place that you can get plugins is at dev.bukkit.org where there are thousands of them!
To install a plugin you simply download the .jar to the minecraft/plugins folder and restart the server. For example, WorldGuard is a very popular plugin that lets you add protection to different areas of your server.
To install this plugin on our Minecraft server we would use the following commands:
cd ~/minecraft/plugins
curl -H "Accept-Encoding: identity" -H "Accept-Language: en" -L -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.12.212 Safari/537.36" -o worldguard.jarhttps://dev.bukkit.org/projects/worldguard/files/latest
sudo systemctl restart minecraft
The reason the middle line is so long is that “robots” (roughly anything that isn’t a web browser being used by a user in this context) including scripts and utilities are blocked by the Bukkit server. The extra parameters we’re including in this line will add the location (-L) flag as well as a user agent and an identity / language header which will allow us to fetch the files without getting a 403 forbidden error.
Make sure to change “-o worldguard.jar” (second to last parameter) and the URL (very last parameter) to match the project you want to download.
The server will restart and the plugin will be installed. It’s that simple! To use the plugin refer to the documentation on the plugin download page to find out which commands you use to configure/interact with it.
Warning: be advised that plugins are the #1 issue for performance degradation on Minecraft servers. This isn’t because all plugins are bad. Some plugins are coded very inefficiently or perform features that require a lot of hooks in the code.
You should be careful about what plugins you install on the server and if you start having bad performance disable your plugins one by one until you find the culprit!
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 25565. The type of connection is TCP if your router asks. Once you do this people will be able to connect to your Minecraft server through your public IP address. This is different than your local IP which is usually a 192.x.x.x or 10.x.x.x. If you don’t know what that is just go to google and type “what’s my ip” and Google will kindly tell you!
Wired vs. Wireless
Going with an ethernet (wired) connection is going to be faster and more reliable. There’s so much wireless traffic and other interference in the air that running your server on WiFi is not recommended.
Even if it is working great 99% of the time it can ruin your experience very quickly if the WiFi drops for a couple of seconds and you get blown up by a creeper!
All that being said, the server works fine on wireless. The script will work fine as is with a wireless connection.
Upgrading
PLEASE BACK UP YOUR SERVER FIRST! The server makes automated backups by default for you in the backups folder but I recommend you back up the entire server folder yourself (basically the entire minecraft folder) any time you attempt to upgrade or downgrade. If you need to roll back to older versions it won’t work without a backup from that version or older!
The easiest way to upgrade an installation is to download the latest SetupMinecraft.sh and run it. This will automatically upgrade you to the latest version.
Upgrading and downgrading to versions that aren’t the default the script chooses is pretty simple. Simply change the Version line at the top in the SetupMinecraft.sh script:
#!/bin/bash # Minecraft Server Installation Script - James A. Chambers - https://jamesachambers.com # More information at https://jamesachambers.com/raspberry-pi-minecraft-server-script-with-startup-service/ # GitHub Repository: https://github.com/TheRemote/RaspberryPiMinecraft
# Minecraft server version Version="1.16.1"
Edit this file in your favorite text editor (you can use nano or vi on the Pi like nano SetupMinecraft.sh) and change the Minecraft version to what you want.
Downgrading
PLEASE RESTORE USING A BACK UP FROM THE VERSION YOU ARE DOWNGRADING TO
If you are having problems on a newer version of Minecraft and want to downgrade you can do so using a complete backup of your server before you ran it on a newer version.
The reason you can’t take server data that has been touched by a version such as 1.17 and go back to 1.16 is that the new version adds all sorts of new data types/structures for the new content into your server data files. If you try to roll back the old versions of the Minecraft server will not understand these data types since they didn’t exist in that version and will crash.
As long as you use a backup for your server files from that version (or older) it’s as simple as changing the version in SetupMinecraft.sh just like I show in the “Upgrading” section.
You can upgrade any old version of Minecraft to any version, but again make sure you have a backup first as it is a one way street and you will need that backup if you want to roll back!
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.
Version History
To view the version history check out the GitHub README here:
1,112 thoughts on “Raspberry Pi Minecraft Server Setup Script w/ Startup Service”
stizn
Hy James,
don’t know if you’ve already seen it. PaperMC has announced that their download API version 1 will shutdown in November 2021.
You may want to have a look into the docs for version 2.
It seems that there won’t be a ‘latest build’ to fetch, I’m sure you can find a fix for this.
This does sound vaguely familiar but if I knew about it once I had totally forgotten! Thanks for reminding me.
This is actually very annoying. We actually somewhat are the target of this change (although not the only target I’m sure). The new API is literally a downgrade. All they are doing is taking things away we used to have and from what I can tell there isn’t a single new feature. It’s a disgrace to the “v2” moniker!
It looks like I’ll roughly have to change it from something like /latest to
and then have the code parse the json and request the latest paperclip.jar based on that number. This should actually work fine with our framework because latest can change to the version that is at the top of SetupMinecraft.sh. This version doesn’t autoupdate anyway until you run SetupMinecraft.sh again so I think this will work.
Thank you for reminding me so I can get this fix in. The new API is live so I’ll probably upload this sometime today here!
UPDATE 1:30pm: I actually just finished it. Defeating this was as simple as:
# Get latest build
BuildJSON=$(curl -H "Accept-Encoding: identity" -H "Accept-Language: en" -L -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.4.212 Safari/537.36" https://papermc.io/api/v2/projects/paper/versions/verselect)
Build=$(echo "$BuildJSON" | rev | cut -d, -f 1 | cut -d] -f 2 | rev)
Build=$(($Build + 0))
if [[ $Build != 0 ]]; then
echo "Latest paperclip build found: $Build"
curl -H "Accept-Encoding: identity" -H "Accept-Language: en" -L -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.4.212 Safari/537.36" -o paperclip.jar "https://papermc.io/api/v2/projects/paper/versions/verselect/builds/$Build/downloads/paper-verselect-$Build.jar"
else
echo "Unable to retrieve latest Paper build (got result of $Build)"
fi
Nice to hear that! As a quick workaround for now, it would be as simple as replacing the corresponding server.jar file after your script is setup, deleting the rest of the server files and rebooting the machine? So with the auto start function it will create the files for this type of server? Do you think that would work to keep the advantages (daily back, “shortcut” commands and autostart) of your script?
That’s probably about right. The only other thing that may need a tweak is it runs paperclip.jar which downloads and patches the main server.jar. That’s the only other sticking point that may need to be changed to just the Forge/Fabric launcher binary or something like that.
If it works the same way as paperclip.jar does it probably downloads and patches the main server .jar file in the same way Paperclip does and you would just want to point it at that launcher instead of paperclip.jar.
Oh… I don’t know much about the subject and I got lost in the middle of your explanations… Is it hard to learn how to do it? Can you address me somehow? Right now, what would be the real possibilities for you to adapt the script for Fabric?
May I ask why? What is it that Fabric can do that you can’t do with Paper / Spigot / Bukkit? I think the Paper server is the most respected and popular overall but I believe that Fabric is the other “big competitor”. I’m not saying I know better or anything like that, quite the contrary, I definitely want to understand what it is about this flavor that appeals to people or what it can do that the other ones can’t.
I’d say it’s probably not very hard but it might be hard if you haven’t ever done anything with scripting / bash before for sure. Even though I think it will largely be swapping out the binaries I think there will probably be a couple of things that are slightly different and need some changes/adjustments and that is where things will get really hard for a scripting/bash beginner without a base of experience to draw on.
It may help me to understand what it is people want this specific flavor for though!
Sure! It seems that Fabric is surpassing Forge, which was the standard, and Fabric is right now at least as popular as Forge is. This is due to the very good performance Fabric is getting with Sodium, Lithium and Phosphor mods. The main difference between Fabric and Forge in contrast with Paper/Spigot/Bukkit is that Fabric and Forge support mods (and modpacks) and Paper/Spigot/Bukkit support plugins. Plugins are used to change and enhance existing Minecraft content, and mods are used to add new items/features to Minecraft and enhance the existing gameplay. People prefer to play with mods. The most featured and popular mods have been released for Forge for a long time, but right now devs are releasing their mods for Fabric and Forge.
Okay. Thank you for letting me know. I hope sometime to read an article of you about a Fabric script hahaha.
To be honest, I started using your script in a RPi3 running Raspian Lite, then I used it in an old office desktop PC running Ubuntu Server, which gives me more performance. I found your script really useful 🙂 But now I want to play with mods so I’m looking for ways to get the same as your script: Mainly auto-start the minecraft server and daily backup, and despite being useful, I can live without the “shortcut” commands if I don’t get anything to work like that hahaha
Thanks, that actually clears things up quite a bit for me. I had in my head that the big difference between the Paper/Spigot and Forge/Fabric is that the “plugins” are largely server side and the “mods” are actual enhancements to the client like totally new features etc. but I like the technical explanation of modpacks as well!
I think the reason I have a blind side here is although I’ve been playing Minecraft for nearly a decade here I always like playing vanilla (settings, still on Paper) survival on the highest difficulty and building everything from twigs with a group of friends about once per year or major patch/release. I never really was a “modder” for Minecraft although I have played on some of the giant Paper servers that have hundreds of players online before for sure. I definitely hadn’t touched the mod stuff too much but I bet there’s some really interesting stuff you can do.
I’ll definitely look into it! I don’t think it would be too hard and it seems like it serves a different niche of servers/people than the Paper/Spigot ecosystem. Thanks for the reply!
GCAF
hi James,
thanks to you for actually considering my request and having a chat about it 🙂 If you need any help maybe I can help you.
Right now I’m running a fabric server with a modpack in an old office desktop PC on Ubuntu Server for my friends and me that is working just as it should be. And I was able to set the auto-start “feature” via systemd. Quite an achievement for me hahaha
Welcome back! I’m thrilled that you ran with this and were able to get a Fabric server up (with a modpack too!).
It really is quite the achievement. Many of my projects on GitHub were born exactly the way you just said. There wasn’t anything out there that did anything like what I want (this script is one example of that) so I went out and made it. Was I the best scripter ever when I set out to do it? No, I had absolutely no clue what I was doing in bash when I started out. But over the years I improved it (which improved my bash skills in kind). People came here and pointed out things I could add / fix as well as the GitHub page.
You did it successfully and as far as I know it’s a world first with the systemd autostart feature. I don’t think anyone has done this before that I’ve ever heard of. Congratulations! You honestly probably could even publish it on GitHub as well if you wanted to!
Luis Antonio L Behling
Hello,
I’m having an issue running the 1.17.1 server. The server starts up on my Pi 4, I can join it, it identifies me in scree, -r. But it always crashes and completely shuts down the server within 5 mins of it running.
I would try running SetupMinecraft.sh again and pick a *lower* number for the memory. This usually happens when people set their memory number too high. Counterintuitively this actually won’t leave enough memory for the system processes and will cause the server to crash due to lack of memory (but not for Minecraft, for everything else).
That should get it going here. If not go ahead and post some output from your “logs” folder and we can take a look!
I’ve been having a problem installing plugins from bukkit it keeps saying “awaiting response… 403 Forbidden”. a little help would be greatly appreciated ^_^
I think I know what is going on. It’s likely blocking “robots” and redirects but they’re no match for the Legendary Technology Blog!
curl -H "Accept-Encoding: identity" -H "Accept-Language: en" -L -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.12.212 Safari/537.36" -o worldguard.jar https://dev.bukkit.org/projects/worldguard/files/latest
Just replace worldguard.jar with the file name you want to save it as (as well as the bukkit URL to match the plugin you want to download). Basically what it is doing is allowing redirects with the -L (location) flag as well as sending a user agent matching a browser that a user would have (and a language / identity set of headers).
That should hopefully get it for you (it worked for me and got rid of the 403 Forbidden and saved the jar)! I’ve also updated the guide with this new line as I don’t want to be giving out outdated instructions that don’t work so that should be the instructions for everyone from now on!
Just wondering if there are server commands or a gui setup? i like to play with my daughter on survival, however i like to give her a “boost” with some cheats every now and then.
I don’t believe you use the / in front of the commands in the console. That’s only for using them in-game. Try typing it without the slash and they should work!
The client has a console as well, and that is what they’re talking about. It autopopulates the commands when you’re typing them and actually has a lot more features in the client. You can type op “player name” in the server console and then you can use the in-game client console which has autocomplete and is easier to work with!
Hi. Thanks for the guide. I successfully install 1.16.5 on raspberry pi 2. Now my son asks me for a modded server. Do you have any guide for installing mods for 1.16.5 on raspberry pi 2?
Great question! This was briefly covered in the guide before as “Installing Plugins” but now is called “Installing Mods / Plugins” and I expanded and cleaned up the section a little bit. Instructions on the process of how to install mods (also called plugins and go in a folder called plugins) specifically are in there (super easy, about 3 lines of typing to install a mod and reboot the server).
The installation itself is easy. The tricky part is choosing which ones of the thousands of mods available to install! You may want to check bukkit.org and just browse around the front page to see some of the really popular ones that are available.
This is a Paper Minecraft server under the surface which means it is compatible with all Bukkit / Spigot / Paper mods. Also remember that some mods greatly increase the processing power / resources needed and can cause lag so be especially conscious of that on the Pi and pick the essentials. If things slow down / start lagging then enable/disable the mods one by one to find the culprit. Hopefully that helps!
Hey James this is working great on my 4 with 8gb. Thank you for doing this.
The group didnt really like the seed and wanted to be able to reset it or insert a pre selected one. Is there as easy way to do this?
You can set the seed in server.properties of your server folder. The way I like to do it is start a brand new server and let it start all the way up for the first time then just type “stop” in the console and press enter to close it.
Now go into your ~/minecraft folder:
cd ~/minecraft
nano server.properties
Look for the “level-seed=” line. It shouldn’t have anything in there and will just be empty by default. Paste your seed right in there like:
level-seed=8091867987493326313
Now press Ctrl+X to tell nano to save and then type “y” for yes.
Now since this is a brand new server let’s remove the “world” folder in this new server folder (be careful, don’t do this on an existing server without having backups or you’ll literally delete your world/buildings/etc):
rm -rf world
That’s it. Now start the new server up with:
sudo systemctl start yourserver
and it will be the seed you put in server.properties used to generate the level/world!
Hy James,
don’t know if you’ve already seen it. PaperMC has announced that their download API version 1 will shutdown in November 2021.
You may want to have a look into the docs for version 2.
It seems that there won’t be a ‘latest build’ to fetch, I’m sure you can find a fix for this.
Thanks a lot for all your work!
Have a nice day
stizn
Hey stizn,
This does sound vaguely familiar but if I knew about it once I had totally forgotten! Thanks for reminding me.
This is actually very annoying. We actually somewhat are the target of this change (although not the only target I’m sure). The new API is literally a downgrade. All they are doing is taking things away we used to have and from what I can tell there isn’t a single new feature. It’s a disgrace to the “v2” moniker!
It looks like I’ll roughly have to change it from something like /latest to
httx://papermc.io/api/v2/projects/paper/versions/1.17.1and then have the code parse the json and request the latest paperclip.jar based on that number. This should actually work fine with our framework because latest can change to the version that is at the top of SetupMinecraft.sh. This version doesn’t autoupdate anyway until you run SetupMinecraft.sh again so I think this will work.
Thank you for reminding me so I can get this fix in. The new API is live so I’ll probably upload this sometime today here!
UPDATE 1:30pm: I actually just finished it. Defeating this was as simple as:
# Get latest buildBuildJSON=$(curl -H "Accept-Encoding: identity" -H "Accept-Language: en" -L -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.4.212 Safari/537.36" https://papermc.io/api/v2/projects/paper/versions/verselect)
Build=$(echo "$BuildJSON" | rev | cut -d, -f 1 | cut -d] -f 2 | rev)
Build=$(($Build + 0))
if [[ $Build != 0 ]]; then
echo "Latest paperclip build found: $Build"
curl -H "Accept-Encoding: identity" -H "Accept-Language: en" -L -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.4.212 Safari/537.36" -o paperclip.jar "https://papermc.io/api/v2/projects/paper/versions/verselect/builds/$Build/downloads/paper-verselect-$Build.jar"
else
echo "Unable to retrieve latest Paper build (got result of $Build)"
fi
This is now live on GitHub!
Hy James,
You are awesome! There is nothing more to say.
greetings stizn
Hey Stizn,
That is very much appreciated, thanks for stopping by and leaving that, it’s a great thing to see when I start working on the site!
Do you intend to make a script similar to this one to create a Forge or Fabric server?
Hey GCAF,
I haven’t tried running one of those types of servers yet but I would not be opposed to it if there is enough interest shown!
Nice to hear that! As a quick workaround for now, it would be as simple as replacing the corresponding server.jar file after your script is setup, deleting the rest of the server files and rebooting the machine? So with the auto start function it will create the files for this type of server? Do you think that would work to keep the advantages (daily back, “shortcut” commands and autostart) of your script?
That’s probably about right. The only other thing that may need a tweak is it runs paperclip.jar which downloads and patches the main server.jar. That’s the only other sticking point that may need to be changed to just the Forge/Fabric launcher binary or something like that.
If it works the same way as paperclip.jar does it probably downloads and patches the main server .jar file in the same way Paperclip does and you would just want to point it at that launcher instead of paperclip.jar.
All in all I don’t think it would be too hard!
Oh… I don’t know much about the subject and I got lost in the middle of your explanations… Is it hard to learn how to do it? Can you address me somehow? Right now, what would be the real possibilities for you to adapt the script for Fabric?
May I ask why? What is it that Fabric can do that you can’t do with Paper / Spigot / Bukkit? I think the Paper server is the most respected and popular overall but I believe that Fabric is the other “big competitor”. I’m not saying I know better or anything like that, quite the contrary, I definitely want to understand what it is about this flavor that appeals to people or what it can do that the other ones can’t.
I’d say it’s probably not very hard but it might be hard if you haven’t ever done anything with scripting / bash before for sure. Even though I think it will largely be swapping out the binaries I think there will probably be a couple of things that are slightly different and need some changes/adjustments and that is where things will get really hard for a scripting/bash beginner without a base of experience to draw on.
It may help me to understand what it is people want this specific flavor for though!
Sure! It seems that Fabric is surpassing Forge, which was the standard, and Fabric is right now at least as popular as Forge is. This is due to the very good performance Fabric is getting with Sodium, Lithium and Phosphor mods. The main difference between Fabric and Forge in contrast with Paper/Spigot/Bukkit is that Fabric and Forge support mods (and modpacks) and Paper/Spigot/Bukkit support plugins. Plugins are used to change and enhance existing Minecraft content, and mods are used to add new items/features to Minecraft and enhance the existing gameplay. People prefer to play with mods. The most featured and popular mods have been released for Forge for a long time, but right now devs are releasing their mods for Fabric and Forge.
Okay. Thank you for letting me know. I hope sometime to read an article of you about a Fabric script hahaha.
To be honest, I started using your script in a RPi3 running Raspian Lite, then I used it in an old office desktop PC running Ubuntu Server, which gives me more performance. I found your script really useful 🙂 But now I want to play with mods so I’m looking for ways to get the same as your script: Mainly auto-start the minecraft server and daily backup, and despite being useful, I can live without the “shortcut” commands if I don’t get anything to work like that hahaha
Hey GCAF,
Thanks, that actually clears things up quite a bit for me. I had in my head that the big difference between the Paper/Spigot and Forge/Fabric is that the “plugins” are largely server side and the “mods” are actual enhancements to the client like totally new features etc. but I like the technical explanation of modpacks as well!
I think the reason I have a blind side here is although I’ve been playing Minecraft for nearly a decade here I always like playing vanilla (settings, still on Paper) survival on the highest difficulty and building everything from twigs with a group of friends about once per year or major patch/release. I never really was a “modder” for Minecraft although I have played on some of the giant Paper servers that have hundreds of players online before for sure. I definitely hadn’t touched the mod stuff too much but I bet there’s some really interesting stuff you can do.
I’ll definitely look into it! I don’t think it would be too hard and it seems like it serves a different niche of servers/people than the Paper/Spigot ecosystem. Thanks for the reply!
hi James,
thanks to you for actually considering my request and having a chat about it 🙂 If you need any help maybe I can help you.
Right now I’m running a fabric server with a modpack in an old office desktop PC on Ubuntu Server for my friends and me that is working just as it should be. And I was able to set the auto-start “feature” via systemd. Quite an achievement for me hahaha
Hey GCAF,
Welcome back! I’m thrilled that you ran with this and were able to get a Fabric server up (with a modpack too!).
It really is quite the achievement. Many of my projects on GitHub were born exactly the way you just said. There wasn’t anything out there that did anything like what I want (this script is one example of that) so I went out and made it. Was I the best scripter ever when I set out to do it? No, I had absolutely no clue what I was doing in bash when I started out. But over the years I improved it (which improved my bash skills in kind). People came here and pointed out things I could add / fix as well as the GitHub page.
You did it successfully and as far as I know it’s a world first with the systemd autostart feature. I don’t think anyone has done this before that I’ve ever heard of. Congratulations! You honestly probably could even publish it on GitHub as well if you wanted to!
Hello,
I’m having an issue running the 1.17.1 server. The server starts up on my Pi 4, I can join it, it identifies me in scree, -r. But it always crashes and completely shuts down the server within 5 mins of it running.
Hey Luis,
I would try running SetupMinecraft.sh again and pick a *lower* number for the memory. This usually happens when people set their memory number too high. Counterintuitively this actually won’t leave enough memory for the system processes and will cause the server to crash due to lack of memory (but not for Minecraft, for everything else).
That should get it going here. If not go ahead and post some output from your “logs” folder and we can take a look!
I’ve been having a problem installing plugins from bukkit it keeps saying “awaiting response… 403 Forbidden”. a little help would be greatly appreciated ^_^
Hey BIG DC,
I think I know what is going on. It’s likely blocking “robots” and redirects but they’re no match for the Legendary Technology Blog!
curl -H "Accept-Encoding: identity" -H "Accept-Language: en" -L -A "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/90.0.12.212 Safari/537.36" -o worldguard.jar https://dev.bukkit.org/projects/worldguard/files/latestJust replace worldguard.jar with the file name you want to save it as (as well as the bukkit URL to match the plugin you want to download). Basically what it is doing is allowing redirects with the -L (location) flag as well as sending a user agent matching a browser that a user would have (and a language / identity set of headers).
That should hopefully get it for you (it worked for me and got rid of the 403 Forbidden and saved the jar)! I’ve also updated the guide with this new line as I don’t want to be giving out outdated instructions that don’t work so that should be the instructions for everyone from now on!
Hi.
Just wondering if there are server commands or a gui setup? i like to play with my daughter on survival, however i like to give her a “boost” with some cheats every now and then.
Hey Mathew,
There absolutely are! If you type:
screen -r minecraftor
screen -rthe server console will come up. It’s not really a GUI but it’s a console window where you can type commands directly into the server console.
You can see a list of all the cheats and other commands here. Hopefully that helps!
Thanks for the reply. Not sure what is happening but the /help command isn’t even working. Just says “unknown command”.
I don’t believe you use the / in front of the commands in the console. That’s only for using them in-game. Try typing it without the slash and they should work!
Thanks. Just tried that to see, and it worked. Weird that that’s what is says to type in the console though!
Hey Mathew,
The client has a console as well, and that is what they’re talking about. It autopopulates the commands when you’re typing them and actually has a lot more features in the client. You can type op “player name” in the server console and then you can use the in-game client console which has autocomplete and is easier to work with!
Hi. Thanks for the guide. I successfully install 1.16.5 on raspberry pi 2. Now my son asks me for a modded server. Do you have any guide for installing mods for 1.16.5 on raspberry pi 2?
Thanks,
Jerry
Hey Jerry,
Great question! This was briefly covered in the guide before as “Installing Plugins” but now is called “Installing Mods / Plugins” and I expanded and cleaned up the section a little bit. Instructions on the process of how to install mods (also called plugins and go in a folder called plugins) specifically are in there (super easy, about 3 lines of typing to install a mod and reboot the server).
The installation itself is easy. The tricky part is choosing which ones of the thousands of mods available to install! You may want to check bukkit.org and just browse around the front page to see some of the really popular ones that are available.
This is a Paper Minecraft server under the surface which means it is compatible with all Bukkit / Spigot / Paper mods. Also remember that some mods greatly increase the processing power / resources needed and can cause lag so be especially conscious of that on the Pi and pick the essentials. If things slow down / start lagging then enable/disable the mods one by one to find the culprit. Hopefully that helps!
Thank you James for the swift reply!
No problem at all, thanks for the kind words and best of luck / have fun!
Hey James this is working great on my 4 with 8gb. Thank you for doing this.
The group didnt really like the seed and wanted to be able to reset it or insert a pre selected one. Is there as easy way to do this?
Thanks,
Wes
Hey Wes,
Great question, and thanks for the kind words!
You can set the seed in server.properties of your server folder. The way I like to do it is start a brand new server and let it start all the way up for the first time then just type “stop” in the console and press enter to close it.
Now go into your ~/minecraft folder:
cd ~/minecraftnano server.properties
Look for the “level-seed=” line. It shouldn’t have anything in there and will just be empty by default. Paste your seed right in there like:
level-seed=8091867987493326313Now press Ctrl+X to tell nano to save and then type “y” for yes.
Now since this is a brand new server let’s remove the “world” folder in this new server folder (be careful, don’t do this on an existing server without having backups or you’ll literally delete your world/buildings/etc):
rm -rf worldThat’s it. Now start the new server up with:
sudo systemctl start yourserverand it will be the seed you put in server.properties used to generate the level/world!