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How to Install Minecraft Server (FTB Edition)

In this tutorial we go through the full installation of Minecraft on a Linux server.  You can follow along with the install process and get up and running in a few hours.  I know hours seems like a long time but there are files that need to be downloaded and this just takes a variable amount of time.

Installing the Linux Server

  1. Pick you flavor of Linux OS to install. In this tutorial we will use CentOS 7.
    • Open a browser to page: https://www.centos.org/download
    • Click on the orange DVD ISO button.
    • Select a mirror that is close to your region and download the ISO file for the DVD.
  2. If your installing the OS directly on your Hardware you will need to create a bootable USB drive for the ISO file you downloaded from CentOS website. If your using VMWare or HyperV you can skip to step 3 the installation. Just make sure to mount the ISO file as the CD drive.
    • Download Rufus https://rufus.ie or a like utility that will take an ISO file and create a bootable USB drive.
    • Insert a USB drive that has enough space to fit the DVD ISO image. Any drive over 5 GB will do.
  3. Insert your USB drive or mount the ISO image in your cloud server. Turn on your machine.
  4. The first step asks if you want to test your install media. You can skip the test unless you had problems creating your media. Select Install CentOS 7 by using your arrow keys.
  5. Your machine will take a few minutes to boot up and show you’re the GUI installer. The first screen is going to ask what language you want to use. Since I only speak English I will select the English (United States) option and the click continue.
  6. The next screen we have a couple of items that needs our attention.
  7. Make sure to leave the software selection to Minimal Install.
  8. For the most part we are only going to focus on the System section.
    • Find the installation destination and click on it.
    • The installer should auto select the proper HDD, if you have more than one then make sure to select the HDD you want the installation destination for your OS drive.
    • Leave the other defaults since the install is fairly smart on setting things up properly.
    • Click done.
  9. Now click on the section below Network & Host Name.
    • If you have more than one NIC listed, make sure to select the one you want to use.
    • Click the Configure… button.
    • In the NIC editor select the IPv4 tab.
    • Change from DHCP to Manual. Server need to have a static IP address so you can always access them from the same place. You can setup DHCP to do this for you but this is beyond the scope of this tutorial. (You will need to setup and IP Address for your network)
    • Click the add button next to the addresses box.
    • Enter you IP information, netmask, and gateway.
    • Enter the DNS server for your network. If you don’t know them then use public DNS servers like 8.8.8.8
    • Click save. This will take you back to the NIC selection screen.
    • Make sure to turn on the NIC card in the upper right corner of the screen.
    • (option) You can set a host name for this computer.
    • Click the Done button.
  10. Click the Begin Installation button.
  11. Now set the root password.
  12. Typically, I create a super user so that later we can disable remote login for the root account.
    • Type in the name of the new user.
    • Create a login name for the new user, this usually is auto created as first initial and last name.
    • Turn on the Make this user Administrator…
    • Set password
    • Click done
    • The installation will take a few minutes. Time to take another break. It is advised not to drink alcohol during this process because it may lead to weird anomalies during the installation process. Okay so that isn’t entirely true but we will warn you to make sure if your drinking that your drink reasonably and never drink and drive.
  13. Once install is done click the Reboot button.
  14. When your server is done booting connect to it from another computer using putty or any other SSH client.
  15. Login as the user account you created in step 12
  16. We are going to do a lot of work in the console so we will need to run in an elevated state
    • Type the command: sudo su –
    • Renter your original user’s password.
  17. We will need to update the server before we do anything. Also we will install a few simple utilities that will help make managing the server easier. Type the following commands one at a time:
    • yum update -y
    • yum install screen wget unzip java-1.8.0-openjdk -y

Firewall Considerations

By default CentOS 7 installs a firewall and closes off most communication ports to the server.  There are two options to fix this problem with the server.  One would be to turn the firewall off but I don’t like doing this to public facing servers so it really isn’t an option for me.  The second option which is the preferred option is to add rules to our firewall to allow Minecraft user to connect.

Doing a quick Internet search I found this page that tells us what important ports are needed for our Minecraft server to work: https://portforward.com/minecraft/.  Looking at that page in order for PC to connect to the server we will need TCP port 25565 (or the port configured in the server.properties file) and UDP ports 19132, 19133, and 25565.

Type in the following commands to allow Minecraft to connect to the server:

firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=25565/tcp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=13132-13133/udp
firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=25565/udp
firewall-cmd --reload

Installing Minecraft FTB Revelation Server

Now it is time to start installing the server.  FTB server are easy to setup since they include server utility scripts for either Windows or Linux based servers.  Type in the following commands to install and setup FTB Revelation:

cd /var/games
mkdir revelation_3.0.1
cd revelation_3.0.1
wget https://www.feed-the-beast.com/projects/ftb-revelation/files/2712063/download
mv download FTBRevelationServer_3.0.1.zip
unzip FTBRevelationServer_3.0.1.zip
chmod 754 FTBInstall.sh
chmod 754 ServerStart.sh
./FTBInstall.sh
./ServerStart.sh
vi eula.txt

Set the eula value to true

./ServerStart.sh

Once server is up and running type shutdown when you see “Resrtarting server in 5” press ctrl+c to stop the server from restarting.

Edit Server Settings

To edit settings type in the command: 

vi server.properties

Now that the MC server is installed and working we can update the server settings file to customize our server. Since there are a lot of settings please take a look at the Minecraft wiki page that talks about all these settings.  The most interesting ones we use are allow-nether, gamemode, difficulty, pvp, max-players, server-port, level-name, level-seed, displayname, and motd.

Finally Running the Server

So now we have all our settings done it is time to do a little clean up and start our server.  If you change the name of your world which is highly recomended you will need to delete the original world folder created when we launched the server.  To do this just type:

rm world -rf

Now to make this server run in a way we don’t have to have a console session running to keep it up.  Type in the following commands to finally start the server:

screen
./ServerStart.sh

Once the server is up and running we can exit the screen session by pressing [CTRL] + [A] [D] this will take us back to the original shell.  If you want to connect back to the server you can type screen -r.  The screen command will stay open between your putty sessions so this is a perfect tool to use to connect and run our Minecraft servers.

Happy Minecrafting.

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