Let’s say that you want to install a Fabric server on a machine which does not have GUI support. For example, if you have rented a VPS, and you want to run your own Fabric server on that

For Minecraft 1.16.X or older, the required version of Java is 8+ For Minecraft 1.17.X, the required version of Java is 16+ For Minecraft 1.18.X or newer, the required version of Java is 17+

You will also need a way to download files to the server. This can be done using a file transfer, curl or wget

1. Create and enter a directory to put the server in
2. Transfer the latest version of the Fabric Installer
   • Curl: Find the download url of the installer jar from this page (right click the button and copy the download link). Then, inside the server directory, run curl -o installer.jar <paste link here>
   • Wget: Find the download url of the installer jar from this page (right click the button and copy the download link). Then, inside the server directory, run wget -O installer.jar <paste link here>
   • File transfer: Download the installer jar from this page and transfer it into the server directory
3. Run the installer. java -jar installer.jar server -mcversion <Minecraft version> -downloadMinecraft
4. There should be a fabric-server-launch.jar file now. You can now delete the installer file
5. To launch the server, run fabric-server-launch.jar instead of the server.jar. If this must be changed, see the notes below

If you are required to name the main jar server.jar, first rename the original server.jar to vanilla.jar and update the name in fabric-server-launcher.properties to serverJar=vanilla.jar. Then, the fabric-server-launch.jar file can be named anything

If you are unable to run any commands on the server, you can perform all these steps on your own computer and transfer both files in your server directory

# Download dependencies
sudo apt install openjdk-17-jre-headless curl
 
# Create the server folder and enter it
mkdir fabric
cd fabric
 
# Download the installer
curl -o installer.jar <installer jar url>
 
# Run the installer
java -jar installer.jar server -mcversion 1.18.1 -downloadMinecraft
 
# Delete installer file
rm installer.jar
 
# Rename jars
mv server.jar vanilla.jar
mv fabric-server-launch.jar server.jar
echo "serverJar=vanilla.jar" > fabric-server-launcher.properties
 
# Start the server
java -jar server.jar