I am felt up with my Game Service shared provider’s billing policies and I seriously trying to consider all options/help i might be able to get. Including trying to just rent a suitable VPS instead…
Does anybody know anything else that might help me runs Minetest gaming servers? Or anybody here who might be able help me sort this out?
Thanks you very much in advance!
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Interesting I thank you for looking into all of that of me so yea I don’t think Portainer is gonna work then. As I assumed it was similar to Pterodactyl but for general containers. Like file manager, editor, etc.
As for minetesthosting.com I tried contacting them a year ago but haven’t seen anything from them. Though I suppose it may be worth reaching out to them once more now it been awhile? If so I gonna see what another guy is willing to do as they wanted me to file a ticket as they reached me on the forums. I wonder if they “fix me up” instead.
Still thanks for doing everything in regards to Portainer even though it wasn’t as “point and click” as I thought it would be.
Okay! :) Easiest to get a Minetest server up and running imho :
- Install Ubuntu 20.04 on a VPS
- Add the PPA for Minetest and install Minetest https://launchpad.net/~minetestdevs/+archive/ubuntu/stable
- Reboot and after a few minutes connect to your VPS ip address to play the game.
p.s. Then editing files or adding files is another chapter. And one should note that with this setup the server is not added to the public server list but anyone can register. Configuring firewall is also another thing.
Maybe host from home? There is also https://linuxgsm.com/ but it doesn’t seem to support Minetest.
Hmm, you are following this guide: https://wiki.minetest.net/Setting_up_a_server ?
What issues are you having with it?
I am just looking for GUI based so I can be considerably more productive than Tmux, nano and all of that jazz. It’s considerably easier for me to open a web page and see the console, power controls, file manager, edit on the fly, etc.
For instance i find it a bit frustrating that I gotta…
- Login the VPS
- Change to user
- run systemctl
Just to cut the power or to start it back up…
Editing a file?
- Log into VPS
- change to user
- cd your way to file
- nano into file
- enter into desired line
- keep on pushing backspace until what’s there is gone
- Finally be able to input your changes
On a GUI I can do the above with a number of reduced steps.
And it does matter since I am usually making changes to the game server often (once or twice daily usually). I can also switch to console, game’s server resources, etc in a few mouse clicks. Instead of figuring out what’s linux commands I gotta do to get there, what’s packages I need, etc etc etc.
Maybe set up Portainer.io with a docker image?
Interesting, the docs are confusing though even in https://documentation.portainer.io/v2.0/deploy/ceinstalldocker/ it doesn’t seems to explains standalones clearly. I am confused if I would need both a “standalone” host or if I would need to also install the agent? If I do does the agent needs to installed on yet another VPS?
Documentation mentions that for Swarms (clusters) the agent is recommended. For standalone, which is most probably what you want I guess, the agent is not needed. So I guess :
docker volume create portainer_data
docker run -d -p 8000:8000 -p 9000:9000 --name=portainer --restart=always -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock -v portainer_data:/data portainer/portainer-ce
is all you need to do on your new VPS in order to get the web admin interface up.
- edit - Though it would be nice to have SSL which does look like a more difficult step to me : https://documentation.portainer.io/v2.0/deploy/ssl/
Indeed, it does seems complicated to get a SSL going. As it doesn’t even seems like it will do a self sign by default?
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https://wiki.debian.org/Self-Signed_Certificate ->
make-ssl-cert
is the name of the script to create a self signed SSL cert.Indeed now of days I don’t think certbot is that hard to run as you can tell it to do it as a temporary web server. So you can skip some steps. However I don’t know what to do with the cert once it been provisioned by Let’s Encrypt so that Portainer “can use it”.
If you usually make the same changes, or edit the same files, you can automate the deployment with Ansible. Then the steps are basically:
- edit file locally (with graphical editor or whatever you want)
- commit to git (optional)
- run
ansible-playbook your-playbook.yml
You can also write a playbook to start/stop the service (and even add a desktop shortcut to execute that).
Indeed, still when I need to edit that one mod or whatever it can be complicated as is already to set this up. Thanks for sharing this interesting approach though.