This series of tutorials are going to show you how to build a low cost (~100USD ) Minecraft server on Raspberry pi 4 with web-based management tool and auto backup.

Before we get started, we have to prepare some hardwares:

Items	Recommendations	Price (USD)
Raspberry Pi 4B	8GB version (minecraft server is a memory cumsuming application)	80.00
Micro SD card	SanDisk Extreme Pro MicroSD 64GB	18.00
Power supply	5V/3A/Type C	3.50
Lan cable	N/A	2.00
Total	–	103.50

Install Ubuntu for Raspberry Pi 4B

Download Ubuntu for Raspberry 4

https://ubuntu.com/download/raspberry-pi

Download and install Etcher

https://www.balena.io/etcher/

Flash Ubuntu image to your micro SD card by Etcher

Insert the micro SD card to your Pi, then connect your lan cable and power supply to it

Connect to your Raspberry Pi

Find IP address of your Raspberry Pi

Method 1: Goto your router dashboard and find the device with name “ubuntu”

Method 2: Run nmap command to scan your network

You may need to download nmap first

Mac: https://nmap.org/book/inst-macosx.html

Windows: https://nmap.org/book/inst-windows.html

The ip range depends on your subnet setting for your router
e.g. If your router dashboard IP address is 192.168.0.1, you may need to change the IP scanning range to 192.168.0.0-255

Find the circled host and that is the IP address for your Raspberry Pi

Connect to your Raspberry Pi via ssh(Mac/Linux), Putty(Windows)

Connection information:

IP address / Hostname	From previous step
User name (Default)	ubuntu
Password (Default)	ubuntu

For Windows users:

You can download Putty below:

https://www.putty.org/

For Mac and Linux users:

Open terminal and run the following command:

You will be asked to change your password, just change and remember your new password.

After you changed your password, you need to logon with your new password.

Install Docker, Minecraft Server and Portainer

Your Raspberry is ready to use and we are going to install

Docker
Portainer
Minecraft Server

Update package

Add required dependences

Add the security key

Add the docker repository for ARM64 + Ubuntu Linux.

Update the repository again.

Set higher priority for docker official repository, instead of using default Ubuntu Repository

Install Docker

Add current user to docker group

Now we have installed docker, then we can install Minecraft Server with single command now.

You can change the parameters to fit your actual requirement, here are some common parameters you may want to change:

Parameters	Description
-p 25565:25565	port assigned to minecraft, 25565 is default port for minecraft server
–restart=always	“always” means the container will restart automatically when the mincraft server is down
-v minecraft_data:/data	Volume name (for storing data), suggest you to follow this, so that you can setup auto backup easier in part 2
–name minecraft-server	Just name the container
-e EULA=TRUE	Accept minecraft server end-user license agreement (EULA), you cannot use the software if you don’t accept it
-e VERSION=1.16.3	Minecraft server version, you can change it to “LATEST” to get the latest version
-e MEMORY=7G	Memory assigned to minecraft server, for 8GB Raspberry Pi, I would recommend you to assign 7GB for minecraft server
-e TZ=Asia/Hong_Kong	Timezone for minecraft server, just change it to your timezone
-e TYPE=PAPER	Use PaperMC server, it claim that it is high performance minecraft server
itzg/minecraft-server:multiarch	User ARM64 architecture build docker image, you cannot change this