Running a dedicated Minecraft server can be a challenging job. You have to find a balance between performance and usability using “server software” that doesn’t seem to be designed to provide for long running, resilient services.

Being a first-time Minecraft server operator I had to tackle various challenges in order to come up with a way to provide a stable and reliable service to my players. The following article is a recollection of the things I implemented and scripts I wrote in order to run a Minecraft 1.8 server. The scripts mentioned are specific to Gentoo Linux, but could also be used on most other Linux flavours, albeit with some modifications to match that platform’s init.d scripts.

Keeping your Gentoo Linux server up to date isn’t as straightforward as let’s say an Ubuntu box, where you would just run $ apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get clean for example.

Gentoo is far too flexible for a one size fits all approach. The commands outlined below come pretty close for daily use though: