Adding Users to Whitelist.json in Minecraft Server 1.8

The first rule of Mojang is you never document shit because secretly you hate the people who play your game.

So the other day I installed Minecraft Server 1.8 on a server for my son, and we couldn’t figure out out to add users to the Whitelist, which only allows access to the server to people who are on the list.

The Minecraft server helpfully doesn’t include any examples or a sample file, and most of the crappy Minecraft sites out there are happy to list the various options, but again no sample files or detailed explanations of how the Whitelist.json needs to be properly formatted.

Anyway, this is the format the Whitelist.json needs:

[
  {
    "uuid": "xxxxx-xxx-xxxxx-xxxx",
    "name": "username"
  }
]

To get the UUID, there are a number of websites (like this one) that will let you enter a username and will kick back the UUID.