How to spin up your own Minecraft server at home
Spinning up your own Minecraft server may seem like a daunting task, here at Aussie Server Hosts, we can manage all the back-end stuff for you!
However in this guide, we can show you how you too, can spin up your own Minecraft server at home, just like how we do it, as well as break down some more important details required for this endeavour.
Requirements Overview
A machine to run your server on (duh!)
Enough CPU and Memory resource for the amount of players you intend to have
A publicly addressable internet connection, not CGNAT (we’ll explain what this is down below)
Hardware Requirements
Here is a simple breakdown requirements outlined by the Gamepedia Minecraft Wiki
| Players | CPU | RAM | Internet Speed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1-3 | Practically any CPU from the last 10 years | 512MB | 3Mbit/s Download 2Mbit/s Upload |
| 3-5 | Practically any CPU from the last 10 years | 1GB | 6Mbit/s Download 3Mbit/s Upload |
| 5-8 | Practically any CPU from the last 8 years | 3GB | 8Mbit/s Download 4Mbit/s Upload |
| 8-12 | A CPU from the last 6 years, at least 3.6Ghz | 5GB | 14Mbit/s Download 7Mbit/s Upload |
| 12+ | A modern CPU in the last few years running 4Ghz+ | 6GB+ | 30Mbit/s Download 15Mbit/s Upload |
Network Requirements
This is an important part. You will need to have a publicly addressable internet connection, without carrier grade NAT, to be able to host a Minecraft server that can be played across the Internet (not required if you only want to play it on your LAN).
What does this mean?
Well, for people to be able to play on your server, they must first be able to access your server.
As you can see, the diagram on the left, people on the internet can directly hit your edge firewall/router, this is what you want as people will need to be able to connect to your IP address that your server will be listening on.
The diagram on the right represents what a CGNAT (carrier grade NAT) network would look like. As you can see, you and your neighbours would be behind your carrier (internet provider)’s firewall and all share a single public IPv4 address. With this sort of setup, you would not be able to host your own server, as there isn’t a way to know whether the incoming traffic is meant for you or your neighbours as, to the public internet, you are one shared IPv4 address.
How can I find out if I have a publicly addressable internet connection?
There are two things will you need to check:
What the IP address the internet sees is
What the IP address is on your edge firewall/router
You can easily check your public facing IP address by any of the multitude of results on Google, one such site is https://find-ip.net/
Here is your public IPv4 address for your convenience:
Next you will need to compare it do the IP address that your edge firewall/router has
Operating System Setup
At Aussie Server Hosts, we run all our servers on a mix of Clear Linux and Ubuntu Linux for higher performance. Now we know not everyone is proficient at Linux, so we have included both guides for both your favourite Linux distro as well as Windows and MacOS.
For Windows, you should add about 2GB extra RAM and a faster CPU to your requirements to that above.
For MacOS, you should add about 1GB extra RAM and a faster CPU to your requirements to that above.
The guide below will be based on the documentation on the Docker Minecraft Server README
Clear Linux
Install docker with
sudo swupd bundle-add containers-basic
Enable and start docker with
sudo systemctl enable docker --now
Make a data directory to attach to
sudo mkdir /mcdata
Run the Minecraft container
sudo docker run -d -v /mcdata:/data -it -e EULA=TRUE -p 25565:25565 --name mc itzg/minecraft-server
Find your server's IP address with
hostname -i
You can now edit the configuration of your server in /mcdata and connect to your server on it's IP address
That's it! You now have a server you can play on your local network! Read on to find out how you can allow people to connect to your server over the internet.
Ubuntu/Debian
Install docker with
sudo apt update -y && sudo apt install docker.io -y
Make a data directory to attach to
sudo mkdir /mcdata
Run the Minecraft container
sudo docker run -d -v /mcdata:/data -it -e EULA=TRUE -p 25565:25565 --name mc itzg/minecraft-server
Find your server's IP address with
hostname -i
You can now edit the configuration of your server in /mcdata and connect to your server on it's IP address
That's it! You now have a server you can play on your local network! Read on to find out how you can allow people to connect to your server over the internet.
CentOS/RHEL
Install podman with
sudo yum install podman-docker -y
Make a data directory to attach to
sudo mkdir /mcdata
Run the Minecraft container
sudo docker run -d -v /mcdata:/data -it -e EULA=TRUE -p 25565:25565 --name mc itzg/minecraft-server
Find your server's IP address with
hostname -i
You can now edit the configuration of your server in /mcdata and connect to your server on it's IP address
That's it! You now have a server you can play on your local network! Read on to find out how you can allow people to connect to your server over the internet.
If you run into permission issues starting the container, you may need to configure selinux properly, which we will cover in another blog! For now, you can setenforce 0, but this is not good practice.
Windows
WIP
MacOS
WIP
Network Setup
To be able to allow your friends to connect to your server over the internet, you will need to have the game ports exposed on the internet.
With this, we will use NAT/Port Forwarding (Network Address Translation + Port Address Translation), which takes your Public IP and Port, explained above, and pass it through/remap it to your internal machine which is running Minecraft. What this does is, when someone tries to access your public IP on that designated port, it instead forwards that connection into the internal address on the specified port.
First we will need to access your edge firewall/router’s interface and find the NAT or Port Forwarding functionality.
WIP
