Here’s a recipe for setting up Minecraft server on OS X. Since I don’t fully trust the server not to have some security hole, I want it to run as user nobody so it doesn’t have a lot of permissions. And I also want it to restart automatically when I reboot the computer. Finally I show how to backup the worlds you create.

There’s three parts to this hint.

1) creating the launchDaemon that starts the minecraft server.
2) how to turn it on and off
3) maintaining backups

The first step is to download the minecraft server jar file from the Mojang website. Currently that site is https://minecraft.net/download but that might change in the future. And currently the jar filename is: minecraft_server.1.6.2.jar, but that will change too.

1) Creating a place for it.
When you run the jar the first time it’s going to create a lot of files and subdirectories the in the current working directory (CWD) so we want to create a nice place to do …

Source: Mac OSX Hints