How to host a Minecraft server on Ubuntu/Debian - Part 1

Hello!

In this post, we want to give you a tutorial about how to host a Minecraft server on Ubuntu/Debian. This tutorial is about Minecraft: Java Edition, not the Bedrock Edition.

First, you need a Ubuntu/Debian server (of course). You can order a virtual machine from DigitalOcean. For the operating system, you can use Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) or Debian 11 (Bullseye).

Please note, your server must have at least 6 GB of RAM. If your server has 4 GB of RAM or lower, you still can follow this tutorial, but your Minecraft server will not run so smoothly and we don't recommend it. We recommend you to have 6 GB of RAM or more.

Second, you should connect to your server through SSH. You can use PuTTY or Termius. After you connecting to your server, you must at least have 1 user that has sudo power/permission. If you don't know how to do it, you can create one user by following command:

adduser <your name>

Example:

adduser sleepnov4

And now, you can give the sudo permission by following command:

usermod -aG sudo <your name>

Example:

usermod -aG sudo sleepnov4

Please note, to give the sudo permission, it must done by using root user account.

We assume if you are currently using the root user account, and you should change to your fresh created user account. You can run this command:

As for security purposes, we don't recommend you to use the root user account for other activity than this. To give a sudo permission to your user account, it requires root user account.

su <your name>

Example:

su sleepnov4

Now, your currently using your fresh created user account, and you can run this command:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

This command will fetch and update all necessary packages to the latest version.

Third, you will need a Java Development Kit or JDK for short.

Since we are about to run a Minecraft: Java Edition server, you will need this to run your Minecraft server. Now, please run these commands in order:

You are about to install a JDK version 17 from Eclipse Adoptium. If you don't want to install the JDK from this organization, you can install the JDK from Azul Zulu or Amazon Correto.

sudo apt install -y wget apt-transport-https
wget -qO - https://packages.adoptium.net/artifactory/api/gpg/key/public | gpg --dearmor | tee /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/adoptium.gpg > /dev/null
echo "deb https://packages.adoptium.net/artifactory/deb $(awk -F= '/^VERSION_CODENAME/{print$2}' /etc/os-release) main" | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/adoptium.list

After you done run those commmands, now, you run these command in order too:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install temurin-17-jdk -y

To check if your JDK already installed or not, you can run this command:

java --version

The command will show you something like this:

openjdk 17.0.9 2023-10-17
OpenJDK Runtime Environment Temurin-17.0.9+9 (build 17.0.9+9)
OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM Temurin-17.0.9+9 (build 17.0.9+9, mixed mode, sharing)

And it means the JDK was successfully installed.

And that's the end for the Part 1 of the tutorial. We will continue the tutorial on the Part 2 post. See you there! 👋