Install a Minecraft Server on CentOS 7

This article is a port of my “Install a Minecraft Server on CentOS 6” tutorial. It has been updated for CentOS 7.

In this tutorial, I will guide you through setting up a Minecraft server on a high-performance SSD VPS at AKLWEB HOST. You will learn how to set up a Minecraft server on CentOS 7 x64.

Requirements

Putty SSH Client
1GB RAM VPS Server With CentOS 7 x64 Installed.

Installation

Creating a Minecraft server is easy. Log in to your new CentOS 7 1GB RAM VPS Server at AKLWEB HOST and install Java 1.6.0 Open JDK.

ssh root@ip.ip.ip.ip
[root@aklwebhost ~]# yum install java-1.6.0-openjdk
<some output here>
Is this ok [y/N]: y

Open the Minecraft server port in firewalld.

firewall-cmd --zone=public --permanent --add-port=25565/tcp
firewall-cmd --reload

Make a user to run your Minecraft server under. This is for security purposes, as it is not good practice to run a Minecraft server as root.

adduser mcserver
#set a secure password.
passwd mcserver
#this allows you to run screen while su'd from root for the next step
chown mcserver tty

Now let's change users and install Minecraft! Change the wget URL accordingly for newer versions of Minecraft.

su - mcserver
mkdir minecraft
cd minecraft
wget -O minecraft_server.jar https://s3.amazonaws.com/Minecraft.Download/versions/1.11.2/minecraft_server.1.11.2.jar
chmod +x minecraft_server.jar
screen
echo "eula=true" > eula.txt
#start your Minecraft Server
java -Xmx768M -Xms768M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui

Congratulations, your Minecraft server is now up and running on your high-performance SSD VPS server!

Notes

To install on a 768MB VPS, follow the same commands above, but change the last Java command to:

java -Xmx512M -Xms512M -jar minecraft_server.jar nogui

If you require more players (and thus more RAM), you just launch a larger instance and then simply subtract 256M from the amount of RAM your instance has allocated. For example, a 4096 instance would launch with -XmX3840M -Xms3840M.