Cuack

Deploy automatically your gameservers on cloud providers (only DigitalOcean is supported so far) in a easy and fast way

Quick start

Create the initialization file and introduce the Personal Access Token (DigitalOcean’s can be found here) and the prefered region slug (these are displayed on screen.)

cuack-ctl init

Create your gameserver with default options (minecraft and factorio supported so far)

# Create a default minecraft server
cuack-ctl create -f https://github.com/casteloig/cuack/tree/main/games/minecraft/default.yaml
# Create a default factorio server
cuack-ctl create -f https://github.com/casteloig/cuack/tree/main/games/factorio/default.yaml

Commands and options

`init`

The init command is used to create the init file with the basic configuration of Cuack. It is stored by default on ~/.config/cuack.config.

This file is composed by two parts:

Parts	Description	Type	Default
token	Where the server provider’s personal token is stored (it should never be shared!).	`string`
region	It is the slug that represents the prefered region where all droplets will be created on.	`string`	lon1

This file must exist and contain all the information above to perform the rest of the commands.

`create`

The create command is used to create a droplet and, then, create a gameserver in that droplet. It does not have any arguments, but it has two flags:

Flags	Flags (short)	Description	Type	Required	Default
`--file`	`-f`	It is the configuration file of the droplet and server	`string`	Yes
`--select`	`-s`	Select one of the existing configurations in the config file passed on `-f`	`string`	No	Selects always the first configuration from the file

A configuration file is a .yaml/.yml file that can either a local file or a remote file (with a URL that starts with https:// or http://). One example of the file would be this one (as an example of minecraft file):

name: minecraft
image: casteloig/mine-server:latest
provider:
  name_prov: digitalocean
  ssh_name: asus-laptop-linux
  cpu: 2
  ram: 2GB
ports:
  main: 25565
  additional: 
    - 25575
params:   
  world_name: world # not used yet
  players: 5
  difficulty: easy
---
name: minecraft-big
image: casteloig/mine-server:latest
provider:
  name_prov: digitalocean
  ssh_name: asus-laptop-linux
  cpu: 2
  ram: 2GB
ports:
  main: 25565
  additional: 
    - 25575
params:   
  world_name: world # not used yet
  players: 10
  difficulty: medium

As you can see, there are two different configurations, you can select which one you want by passing the name of the configuration on the -s flag (in this case minecraft or minecraft-big).

# If we want to create a droplet with the 'minecraft-big' configuration we would do
cuack-ctl -f <path_to_yaml_file> -s minecraft-big

By default, in this repository, exist some basic configs you can use directly or download and modify to your own belong.

Every config file must be composed by two parts:

First part

This part must be static, that means that the variable names and indentation cannot be modified, only the values.

Variables	Description
name	The name that will use the `-s` flag and also will be used to create the droplet name
image	The Docker image that will be used to create the server in the droplet. (more info about how it works)
provider	All the information that the server provider needs to create the droplet. (see the sub-table here)
ports	The ports that the server needs (so docker may use). There must be always one main port, and may be any number of additional ports.

Provider sub-table

Variables	Description	Type
name_prov	So far we only work with DigitalOcean	`string`
ssh_name	The name of the ssh key that you must have created in your server provider	`string`
cpu	Number of CPUs that the droplet will have	`integer`
ram	RAM size that the droplet will have	`string` composed by ‘number of GB‘ + ‘GB’

Second part

This second part it is represented by the upper node called params, and it can be dynamic. Why…? All this second part represent environment variables that Cuack will pass to the docker container. So all Cuack is going to do is to read all the final nodes and treat them as strings that will pass as environment variables. That’s why you can create the yaml structure that you prefer as long as every final node represents a environment variable.

Keep in mind that all values will be strings when passed as environment variables

`list`

The list command is used to list all droplets created on the server providers by cuack.

It shows the droplet’s name and the IP where it is deployed on.

cuack-ctl list

`inspect`

The inspect command is used to see the configuration file (the yaml file) and some other details of the droplet, like CPU and RAM usage.

You must know the name of the droplet, which can be obtained via the list command.

cuack-ctl inspect <name_of_droplet>

It prints in command line the URL where is served a tiny website where it’s displayed all this information. By detault it’s localhost:8080/

ie inspect

`delete`

The delete command is used to delete a server and the droplet that it is deployed on.

It only accepts one argument:

Argument	Description	Type
`name_of_droplet`	It represents the name of the droplet	`string`

cuack-ctl delete <name_of_droplet>

Keep in mind that the name of the droplet is not the same as the name represented in the yaml file when you created the server. That’s because cuack will always take the name in the yaml file and add some extra strings to distinguish two servers created with the same file. So you should check the name with the list command before.

How Cuack uses docker images to start his servers?

Cuack has his own images to deploy his servers because cuack abstracts himself from the way the images are created.

We explained a little bit of this here.

In a nutshell, Cuack just creates the droplet where the server will be deployed and runs the container within the droplet passing all the params as environment variables. This provides a lot of freedom to the way Cuack can be used, because you actually can build your own image of another game/service and run inside of it the application that you want as long as you keep in mind that all the params of the yaml file will be passed as environment variables to the running image.