Minecraft is awesome. There is no doubt about it. Some of us may have been hosting a server for our friends from our home computers. This is great but eventually you either get tired of having your computer on or just want something with a faster Internet connection. To fix this annoyance you can rent a VPS. A Virtual Private Server is a server that you pay a monthly fee to use and you can run it 24/7. If you look around you can usually find some good deals. Check out LowEndBox.com – I just found a 2GB VPS, which is perfect for a small Minecraft server, for just about $2.50 a month!
So now that you have a VPS you could off course go right ahead and install java and run the Minecraft server java file. This is great but not many of us are large fans of the Linux terminal. A work around for avoiding the Linux terminal would be to use a powerful Minecraft server control panel. Today we will be installing McMyAdmin onto a Linux VPS with 2GB of RAM. This will allow us to manage our server and preform tasks like reboots and backups all with a few clicks from a web browser! Let’s get started!
For this article we will assume that you already have a VPS running a Linux 64 bit operating system and you know how to SSH into your server. If you don’t know how to do any of those things, Google is your friend! 🙂
First, we are going to install the latest version of Java for Linux. Go to the Java website on your computer and right click the download for Linux x64 RPM. Select “copy link.” SSH into your server and type the following commands, replace LINK with the link you copied. Each line should be entered into your SSH client separately.
mkdir /usr/java
cd /usr/java
wget LINK
Now due to the Java website and the wget tool the file that we downloaded may look rather strange. We will have to rename the file using the mv tool. Replace FILE NAME with the exact name of the file that you downloaded. If you need to find the name of the file you can run ls at a terminal. Rename the file so it contains the first few words of the file name up until the question mark. Use the following example to help you.
[sam id=”3″ codes=”true”]
mv jre-7u7-linux-x64.rpm?ssdflsdjkfhkjhnfsdkfhlsdkhflsk jre-7u7-linux-x64.rpm
Now will will install the Java RPM. Use the following syntax, replacing the file name to match your file name.
rpm -ivh <file name>
Example:
rpm -ivh jre-7u7-linux-x64.rpm
Java should now be installed onto your Linux VPS. If you get stuck at any point through the installation of Java you can check out the Java RPM installation instructions provided on the Java website.
Now we will install McMyAdmin!
First, create a directory for McMyAdmin.
mkdir /minecraft
cd /minecraft
Now to download and install McMyAdmin. Be sure to type your password for the web panel in the last line.
wget http://mcmyadmin.com/Downloads/MCMA2_glibc25.zip
unzip MCMA2_glibc25.zip
cd /usr/local
wget http://mcmyadmin.com/Downloads/etc.zip
unzip etc.zip
cd /minecraft
./MCMA2_Linux_x86_64 -setpass ENTER-YOUR-NEW-PASSWORD-HERE
Now your server should start. Head over to a web browser and type the following address: http://Your-Server-IP:8080
Log in with the username admin and the password you set earlier.
Here you will be able to configure the server. Once you select everything in the configuration tab, start the server! You should now have a working McMyAdmin Minecraft server running on your VPS!
Bonus
At the moment the server will shutdown if your close the SSH client Window. To fix this simply install screen if you do not already have it. Then run
screen ./MCMA2_Linux_x86_64
to run your server. Then you can close the SSH window and the server will continue running!
Have questions? Ask away in the comments!
