Hi all, I’m looking for useful scripts for deploying game servers to the cloud. Some games for example could be Valheim, Palworld, Project Zomboid, Space Engineers, Minecraft.
I’m looking for anything really. Thanks!
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A lot of those can be run as docker containers so spin up and down can be fast and date migration is pretty easy.
I haven’t spent much time with them — I’m not a devops person — but if you’re doing this at scale, I’d guess that you might want to look into software configuration management tools.
Some major open-source players that run on Linux:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ansible_(software)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_Chef
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puppet_(software)
I’ve only used Puppet, and not really in this role, so I can’t provide a lot of advice specific to their use. But it may be a useful starting point for you, if you’re asking “how do people do things like this?”
kagis
Yeah, I see examples of people deploying game servers with them. To look for Ansible and Valheim, for example:
https://github.com/Aetrius/valheim-ansible
The basic idea is that if you’re running a bunch of servers, you can make changes to a configuration file and the software configuration management package will set up a system to conform to that configuration or propagate all the changes to those servers that don’t yet have those changes applied to them.
EDIT: For Puppet, sounds like they moved to a proprietary model, and OpenVoxProject is the open-source fork.
Use Terraform + Cloudinit scripts if you’re using a cloud platform, and make sure you version everything or use Packer to make versioned images.
Cloudinit and Packer look similar to OpenTofu and Terraform. Thanks!
How does Packer differ from the other three?
Opentofu is Terraform 🤣 I generally don’t throw that out there to prevent confusing people, but I prefer it, honestly.
Packer builds images you can upload to cloud platforms.
Terraform/Opentofu executes API calls to orchestrate spinning things up and down.
Cloudinit is the native built-in bootstrap framework of instances themselves that all the major cloud providers support. It’s what executes as “userdata” as some call it. Check your cloud provider docs for how to hook it in.
