Posted on: 24 Jan 2023

Surprisingly, there isn’t a guide where you can get all the information you really need for this in one spot, so, together with my last post, this will get you everything you need to get a dedicated server running all in one spot.

Since we used Arch in our last example, you’re going to need to install this package:

Make sure these two lines are uncommented in /etc/pacman.conf:
[multilib]

Include = /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

Then install this package:

$ pacman -Sy lib32-gcc-libs

Our server doesn’t have any of the necessary ports open, we’re going to need to set some firewall rules.

Valve’s guide recommends these rules:

iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m udp --sport 27000:27030 --dport 1025:65355 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p udp -m udp --sport 4380 --dport 1025:65355 -j ACCEPT

But my server wouldn’t show up on the server browser until I set these as well:

iptables -A INPUT -p tcp --dport 27015 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p udp --dport 27015 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p udp --dport 27020 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p udp --dport 27005 -j ACCEPT
iptables -A INPUT -p udp --dport 51840 -j ACCEPT

SteamCMD is an AUR package so we’ll just clone it down to install it:

git clone https://aur.archlinux.org/steamcmd.git
cd steamcmd
makepkg -si

You could be smart and make a separate user just to run the server, but, either way, after that in your home directory you can just run this command to get most everything setup (using CSGO for this example but this will work with any game that is supported by SteamCMD, just change the app ID after the +app_update flag):

sudo -u username steamcmd +force_install_dir /pathYouWantToInstallAt +login anonymous +app_update 740 validate +quit

To actually run the server, you’re going to need a dedicated server login token.

If you want to just run the server with the stock config running this command inside your server directory should do it:

./srcds_run -console -game csgo -usercon +sv_setsteamaccount ServerToken +game_type 0 +game_mode 0 +mapgroup mg_active +map de_dust2'

But if you want to customize everything, all the variables are available here and you can set basic stuff like the server name and if you want a password in /serverPath/csgo/cfg/server.cfg

Settings for game mode rules and maps/map groups you can set in /serverPath/csgo/gamemodes_server.txt and need to be formatted like this:

"GameModes_Server.txt"
{
    "gameTypes"
    {
        "classic"
        {
            "gameModes"
            {
                "casual"
                {
                    "mapgroupsMP"
                    {
                        "mg_custom"    ""
                    }
                }
            }
        }
    }

    "mapgroups"
    {
        "mg_custom"
        {
            "name"    "mg_custom"
            "maps"
            {
                "de_dust2" ""
            }
        }
    }
}

Finally, there’s one last file in /serverPath/csgo/ named gamerulescvars.txt.example you can either rename to just gamerulescvars.txt or also go into it and change any settings you like.

Now you can run your customized server with srcds_run and any flags you want to change up the game modes or map groups you set, or install tmux to run the server in the background or setup your server to run it automatically.