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Tickwise
CriticalStartupSIG-ST-003

The server cannot bind its port (FAILED TO BIND TO PORT)

Platforms
Paper · Purpur · single server
Verified
Verified
Confidence
Confidence 95%

What it looks like in the log

Any one of these lines is enough. The agent matches them locally, on your server.

logs/latest.log
  • [WARN] FAILED TO BIND TO PORT!
  • Failed to bind to portin the stack trace

Symptoms

  • The server stops during startup right after “Starting Minecraft server on …”
  • Players cannot connect: the port is taken by another process or the address is unavailable

Cause

The server could not open the TCP port from server.properties: the port is already in use (a second server instance, another process) or server-ip specifies an address that does not exist on the machine.

Possible causes

  • Another instance of this server is already running on the same port (a hung process left over from a restart)
  • The port is taken by another server/service on the same machine (a common mistake when copying a server folder)
  • server-ip points to an address that does not exist on the machine (“Cannot assign requested address”)

How to fixLow risk

  1. Look at the The exception was: line in the evidence: Address already in use — the port is taken; Cannot assign requested address — wrong server-ip.
  2. If the port is taken: find the process (ss -ltnp | grep :<port> on Linux, netstat -ano | findstr :<port> on Windows), stop the duplicate server or change server-port.
  3. If the address is unavailable: leave server-ip= empty (listen on all interfaces) or specify the machine's/container's actual address.
  4. On panel-based hosting, check that the port in server.properties matches the one the panel allocated.

Translated from the Russian original; log lines are quoted verbatim.

Sources