How to schedule an automatic restart on your Minecraft server

Do you need to restart a Minecraft server every day?

Not strictly, but most servers are better off with it. A restart gives back memory that plugins and mods have built up, loads any jars and config files you changed during the day, and happens at a time you choose instead of during a busy evening. Once a day at a quiet hour is enough for most servers.

A restart does not cure lag that comes back within the hour. If the server is slow again soon after starting, the cause is in the world, a plugin or the settings, and find lag with spark shows where the time goes.

The quick way: Automatic restart on the Settings tab

On the Settings tab, under Automatic saves and restarts, switch on Automatic restart, choose Daily or Mondays and an hour, and save. The panel then saves the world with save-all flush and restarts the server a second later, only while the server is running. The hour is in UTC, like every schedule.

That restart comes without a message in chat. If your players should get a warning first, build the restart yourself on the Schedules tab as below, and leave Automatic restart off so the server does not restart twice.

Set up a nightly restart with a warning in chat

1. 1

   Create the schedule

   Open the Schedules tab. Under New schedule, type a name such as Nightly restart, choose Every day under How often and an hour under At. The hour is in UTC, see the next section.

2. 2

   Tick Only run when the server is online

   Then a server you stopped on purpose stays off. Without the tick, a Restart task also starts a server that was not running. Press Create.

3. 3

   Add the warnings

   Press Add a task, choose Console command and type say Restarting in 5 minutes with 0 under Wait first (s). Add a second command, say Restarting in 1 minute, with a wait of 240.

4. 4

   Add the restart

   Add a last task, Power action with Restart, and a wait of 60. The schedule now runs the three tasks in this order.

Each wait counts from the task before it, and one wait can be at most 900 seconds, 15 minutes. A schedule holds up to 10 tasks. Commands go without the slash, just like in the console.

The restart works like the Restart button: the server gets its stop command first, which saves the world, and starts again once it is down. Players are disconnected and can join again as soon as the server is up.

Schedule times are in UTC

The hour you pick under At is UTC, the time zone without summer time. So the moment in your own clock moves by one hour when the clocks change, while the schedule itself stays put.

Europe uses winter time from the last Sunday of October to the last Sunday of March. Players from other parts of the world have their quiet hour somewhere else, so look at when your own server is emptiest.

Test the schedule with Run now

Waiting until four in the morning to see whether it works is not needed. Press Run now on the schedule: it runs the tasks with their waits right away, so you see both messages in chat and then the restart. Do it at a moment when a restart does not bother anyone.

Pause stops a schedule without deleting it, for an event night when nobody should be kicked at five. Activate turns it back on.

Other things a schedule can do

We already make a backup of every server each night. A Create a backup task makes an extra one at your hour. When your plan's backups are full, a scheduled backup removes the oldest one that is not locked, so it never fails for lack of room.

Advanced: write the timing as cron

For times the simple form does not offer, tick Advanced (raw cron). The five fields are minute, hour, day of the month, month and day of the week, all in UTC. A * means every value, */6 means every sixth, and day of the week runs from 0 for Sunday to 6 for Saturday.

Why a scheduled restart did not happen