Whitelist in Minecraft

A Whitelist is the direct opposite of a backlist. While a blacklist most likely holds player names which are banished from the server, a whitelist holds player names who are allowed on the server and blocks every connection attempt from players who are not on this list.

Prerequisites

A whitelist only makes sense if the online-mode is active. If the online mode is deactivated, players can switch names and easily outsmart a whitelist. And since minecraft version 1.7.9 the whitelist identifies players by their uuid (explained below), so if you run a server with online-mode set to false a whitelist simply can't identify cracked Minecraft clients.

How to activate the whitelist

Note that the uuid changes each time if the server has online-mode set to false. A player must be manualy added to the whitelist after each disconnection.

To activate the whitelist for your server, you have to set "white-list=false" to "white-list=true". After that you can add players like explained below.

The following server commands are available:

   Turn whitelist on or off while in game:
   /whitelist on
   /whitelist off

   Add players to the whitelist
   /whitelist add USERNAME
   /whitelist remove USERNAME

   Reload the whitelist (no longer needed since version 1.7.9 and above)
   /whitelist reload

   List all players who are on the whitelist
   /whitelist list

Example for white-list.txt (Version 1.7.8 and lower)

nitrado
hans
peter

Example for white-list.json (Version 1.7.9 and higher)

[
  {
    "uuid": "5c22674c-bad8-45e0-9f3e-82bc3ec39200",
    "name": "nitrado"
  },
  {
    "uuid": "2c27674c-bad8-45e0-9f3e-82bc3ec39200",
    "name": "hans"
  },
  {
    "uuid": "6c27674c-bad8-45e0-9f3e-82bc3ec39200",
    "name": "peter"
  }
]