Set up a Minetest server on a Raspberry Pi

First, ensure that the locale is set correctly with

sudo nano /etc/default/locale

and check to make sure it contains the correct settings. For Americans this will be

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8

Then run raspi-config and update the localization settings and timezone settings.

Then install etckeeper to track changes to config files and bring the system up-to-date with

sudo apt update && sudo apt install etckeeper -y && sudo apt full-upgrade -y

To compile the server, run

sudo apt install -y git build-essential libirrlicht-dev libgettextpo0 libfreetype6-dev cmake libbz2-dev  libjpeg62-turbo-dev libxxf86vm-dev libgl1-mesa-dev libsqlite3-dev libogg-dev libvorbis-dev libopenal-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libluajit-5.1-dev liblua5.1-0-dev libleveldb-dev libzstd-dev
 
cd
 
git clone https://github.com/minetest/minetest.git --branch 5.5.1
 
cd minetest/games
 
git clone https://github.com/minetest/minetest_game.git --branch 5.5.1
 
cd ..
 
cmake . -DRUN_IN_PLACE=0 -DENABLE_GETTEXT=1 -DENABLE_FREETYPE=1 -DENABLE_LEVELDB=0 -DBUILD_CLIENT=0 -DBUILD_SERVER=1
 
make -j$(nproc)
 
cpack -G DEB

Then install Minetest with

sudo dpkg --install minetest-5.5.1-linux.deb

Create paths needed for configuration files with

mkdir -p ~/.config/systemd/user; mkdir -p ~/.minetest/mods; mkdir -p ~/.minetest/worlds/world

and then continue on to the actual configuration process: