Minecraft Server using MineOS

Find links to MineOS downloads and instructions here

For those wanting to run their own Minecraft server (Java edition) MineOS makes for a straightforward setup. Running any flavor of their platform provides a webUI for managing the server, plus easy tools to download the server binary from the Minecraft website or do updates on it. Choosing to run MineOS (especially the Turnkey full OS option) means you can focus on learning system administration and get strait to enjoying the satisfaction of hosting your own server.

Hosting Options

MineOS provides several iterations to choose from when hosting:

• Node.JS webapp that can be added to Minecraft servers hosted in other ways
• MineOS built on Turnkey Linux (Debian-based), for a full OS experience that is ready to go through a single installation
• A Docker image (though I host a Docker Minecraft server through a different method)

My experience with MineOS was as my first Minecraft server, hosted as a virtual machine some years ago. Many features have been added since, but I would still recommend it for first time Minecraft server administrators, especially if hosting for a small group of friends.

Init Script

It has been years since I ran the system, but at the time I found that I needed a custom init script to start the server and run it as a background process that I could reattach and interact with later on, as needed. Considering the intervening years the init script may not be necessary any longer; it has also been lost. However, the utility that I used to run it in the background (so that it could be reattached) was called screen. The screen utility allowed the server to run in a “detached” (with CTRLASpaceD) terminal that could be reattached (with screen -r) at any point so that commands could be run, or output reviewed.

Please try out MineOS as it stands today - I’d be surprised if an init script would be needed these days