Factorio-multienv-ctl

Factorio-multienv-ctl is a fork of factorio-init, which allows you to have multiple environments of factorio servers on the same machine. It also includes a Debian package which will set up both the factorio server binaries and factorio-multienv-ctl.

Quickstart

• Install this package (see prepared Debian package section).
• Run factorio new-game somenameforyourgame or upload a existing savegame to /var/factorio/instances/default/saves/
• Run factorio start or systemctl start factorio@default
• Optionally: run on system boot: systemctl enable factorio@default
• To use another environment:
  • run FENV=myenvname factorio new-game somenameforyourgame
  • run FENV=myenvname factorio start or systemctl start factorio@myenvname

Prepared Debian package

You can find prebuilt packages for Debian 8 at http://repo.factoriommo.org/

These have been known to work on Ubuntu 16.04 and 16.10 as well, they might also work for other apt based distros running systemd as init.

# Add gpg pubkey
curl http://repo.factoriommo.org/apt.gpg | apt-key add -
# or if you prefer wget instead of curl (installed by default on Ubuntu)
wget -O - http://repo.factoriommo.org/apt.gpg | apt-key add -

# Add deb repo entry
echo "deb http://repo.factoriommo.org/ jessie main" > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/factoriommo.list

# Update apt lists
apt-get update

# Install package
apt-get install factorio-multienv-ctl

How does it work

Factorio-multienv-ctl uses the FENV environment variable. This defaults to default. To explain what factorio-multienv-ctl does, here is an overview of what paths are used, and what can be customized.

• Core game files are always installed to /opt/factorio/factorio/.

• The Debian package will create /var/factorio/mods/, in which you can store shared modpacks. More on this later.

• Every instance will have its write-data location set to /var/factorio/instance/{name}/, where {name} defaults to default. This folder contains both saves and mods folders for this instance to use. The server.out and server.pid files will also be put here. Factorio-multienv-ctl automatically overwrites config.ini with the correct write-data entry.

• You can set the environment by setting FENV before using factorio command, which is the factorio-multienv-ctl script, not the actual factorio server binary.

• For auto-startup of factorio servers, you can use the parametrized systemd service. This allows you to enable/start a server like this: systemctl start factorio@{name}, where {name} is the name of the environment. There is no default, you will need to manually run systemctl start factorio@default to enable the default server.

Configuration folder

All configuration that factorio-multienv-ctl recognizes should live in /etc/factorio. Factorio-multienv-ctl will load and try to inherit customizations in the correct order. This however is not done for json files, those completely overwrite the defaults, so ensure your customized server-settings.json contains all values.

Required configfiles:

• config.ini
• server-settings.json

Optionally you may create map-gen-settings.json and/or init.conf (see below), and their paramatric versions.

You can create overrides for specific instances by putting them in /etc/factorio/$FENV/. For instance FENV=asdf to override server-settings.json you create /etc/factorio/asdf/server-settings.json.

Note that /etc/factorio/asdf/init.conf inherits from /etc/factorio/init.conf if it exists, and the json files don't.

If you create /etc/factorio/asdf/config.ini, it will be copied to /var/factorio/instances/asdf/config.ini, and the write_dir will be overwritten in the latter on every start.

Available values for init.conf

The following values all have sane defaults, but can be customized. In theory you can override every variable used in the main script, but it's recommended you don't. We divide the environment variable sin 2 categories: important and details

Important

Alter factorio main metadata

Name	Default Value	Description
FENV	default	name fo the environment representing the factorio server instance
Debug	undefined	enable bass tracing to help debugging. If non-zero, we will output additional information when running the script.
EXTRA_BINARGS	--start-server-load-latest	extra command line arguments you can feed to factorio executable
FUSERNAME	factorio	Username used to run the factorio program
USERGROUP	factorio	User group used to run factorio program
FACTORIO_PATH	/opt/factorio/factorio	Path to a directory where the subpath /bin/x64/factorio can be resolved soundly
SAVELOG	0	If non-zero, we will delete the previous log file before starting the service
SERVER_PORT	34197	the port where the server instance will listen for new connections
WRITE_DIR_BASE	/var/factorio/instances	Directory containing every factorio server data instance
FCONF	Either /etc/factorio/${FENV}/config.ini or, if non-existent, /etc/factorio/config.ini
SERVER_SETTINGS	Either /etc/factorio/${FENV}/server-settings.json or, if non-existent, /etc/factorio/server-settings.json
MAPGEN_CONF	Either /etc/factorio/${FENV}/map-gen-settings.json or, if non-existent, /etc/factorio/map-gen-settings.json
MOD_DIRECTORY	""	If existent, the folder where we will pass to factorio containing the mod to load on the particular server instance. Needs to be writeable for the factorio user.

Details

Alter support metadata of the project

Name	Default Value	Description
PIDFILE_NAME	server.pid	name of the file containing the server process id
WRITE_DIR	/var/factorio/instances/${FENV}	directory where the data of the factorio server instance (specific to the given environment) will be saved.
CMDOUT_FILENAME	factorio.log	File where we will write logs. If CMDOUT is left the default one, the file is placed under WRITE_DIR
FIFO	server.fifo	file representing the communication channel from/to factorio stdin/stdout. If CMDOUT is left the default one, the file is placed under WRITE_DIR
PIDFILE	$WRITE_DIR/server.pid	file containing the server process id. If CMDOUT is left the default one, the file is placed under WRITE_DIR
SERVER_BIND	""

To customize the behavior of factorio-multienv-cli, you can create a bash script like this one:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
EXTRA_BINARGS="--start-server-load-latest"  # you should use `factorio load-save` with this.
RCON_PORT=""
RCON_PASSWORD=""
SAVELOG=0
SERVER_BIND=""
SERVER_PORT=34197
MOD_DIRECTORY=""  # eg: /var/factorio/mods/ArumbaMegaModPack
USERGROUP=factorio
FUSERNAME=factorio
DEBUG=0

factorio-multienv-cli newgame newAwesomeGame

Debugging

If you find yourself wondering why stuff is not working the way you expect:

• Check the logs, you can use factorio log and factorio log --tail, also parametric: FENV=asdf factorio log.
• Enable debugging in the config (by setting DEBUG variable to 1) and/or:
• Try running the same commands as the factorio user (factorio invocation will tell you what the factorio user tries to run at start)

$ factorio invocation
#  Run this as the factorio user, example:
$ sudo -u factorio 'whatever invocation gave you'
# You should see some output in your terminal here, hopefully giving
# you a hint of what is going wrong

Bash autocompletion

Is included with the Debian package, and will activate if you install bash-completion package and enable system-wide completion.

Notable changes from factorio-init

The install and update commands have been removed, dependency on updater python script is also removed.

Also, the config and environment handling has been overhauled to accomodate for multiple environments.

A note on dpkg's configfile handling

Because the Debian package also creates /etc/server-settings.json and other default files, dpkg will track those and notify when a package update tries to overwrite customized versions.

You can move the default files out of the way to prevent this message during updates:

dpkg-divert --add --rename --divert /etc/factorio/.old-server-settings.json /etc/factorio/server-settings.json

You can copy .old-server-settings.json or create a customized server-settings.json afterwards.

Building the Debian package

Prerequisites: devscripts dpkg-dev debhelper debianutils bash-completion

Then run debuild in the folder containing the debian folder (the same one as this readme is in.)

Afterwards, you will find your .deb files one directory up.

Credits and License

factorio-multienv-ctl is based on factorio-init, see https://github.com/Bisa/factorio-init for details.

This code is realeased under the MIT license, see the LICENSE file.