Minecraft Vanilla – service management guide

The Minecraft Vanilla (Java) server on your VPS runs as the minecraft user and is managed by a systemd service called minecraft.service. You can control it easily from the command line and tune its memory usage in the service file.

Start, stop, and check the Minecraft server

Use these commands to control the server:

sudo systemctl start minecraft.service \
    sudo systemctl status minecraft.service \
    sudo systemctl stop minecraft.service

status shows whether the server is running and provides recent log output if you need to debug issues.

Change the RAM allocation for Minecraft

The Java heap size is often controlled with -Xmx (max) and -Xms (min) flags inside the service file.

Open the unit file:

sudo nano /etc/systemd/system/minecraft.service

Find the line that starts the Java process and adjust:

-Xmx to set the maximum RAM for the server
-Xms to set the minimum RAM

After you save the file, reload systemd and restart the service:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl restart minecraft.service

The Minecraft server will now start using the updated RAM limits.