How To Set Up A Whitelist on Your Minecraft Server

Last modified on Oct 6, 2021 in control panel

By ApexHosting

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Overview

Having a whitelist can be quite vital if you have plans on creating a private server. This will only allow players that you add to the whitelist to connect to your server. Anyone else that tries to connect will be blocked from connecting, this keeps your server private and secure. This is great for safety because even though only you should be the only one to know the IP address, sometimes friends will give it out to others who could potentially grief the server.

We always recommend that you add a whitelist to your Minecraft server. Here at Apex, we give each of our users a unique IP, but there is no other protection than this. Whitelisting is the first line of defense to prevent unauthorized users from connecting to your server and potentially damaging your world. Activating a whitelist is very simple and we will walk you through the steps.

How to make a private Minecraft server

Activating the whitelist for Java Edition

1. Head to the Game Panel
2. To the left of the panel, open the console and type “whitelist on”, then press enter.
3. Once you type this, you should see a message that says “Turned on the whitelist” confirming that the whitelist has been successfully activated.

Activating the whitelist for Bedrock Edition

1. Head to the Game panel and stop the server.
2. To the left of the panel, click on “Config Files” then “Server Settings”.
3. Locate “Whitelist” and change it to true, then click save.
4. Head back to the game panel and start the server back up.

Adding players to the whitelist

1. 1. Head to the game panel and open the console.
   2. In the console, you will need to type “whitelist add playername”. For example, “whitelist add LordNoah”.
   3. After you type this command, you will see a message stating “player added to whitelist”.

Removing players from the whitelist

1. Head to the game panel and open the console.
2. In the console, type “whitelist remove playername”.
3. After this command is entered into console, you are going to see a message saying “player removed from whitelist”

Commands

In the console, make sure you are typing these with no /. If you are wanting to use these commands in-game, make sure to use a /.

whitelist on - This activates the whitelist
whitelist off - This disables the whitelist
whitelist add playername - This will add a player to the whitelist
whitelist remove playername - This will remove a player from the whitelist
whitelist list - This will list the players who have been added to the whitelist

Common Issues

Getting the “Not implemented” message when attempting to activate whitelist from the console.
In Bedrock Edition, the whitelist needs to be enabled through the server.properties. Stop the server, head to Config Files, then Server Settings, change “whitelist” to true and press save. Once you do that, just start the server and all you need to do is add players with the “whitelist add playername” command.

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