Introduction

Steam is a gaming platform with one of the largest selections of games. You can play many games online and even create your own server where you can play with your friends. With your own server you control even more of the online gaming experience and can moderate your own rooms. Steam has popular titles such as Counter-Strike or Terraria, and while some are free, they allow you to play as long as you have purchased an original copy of the game.

Prerequisites

For all dedicated servers, a dedicated IP address should be purchased. Click the link below to find out how to set that up.

How to Purchase and Activate a Dedicated Public IP Address for your Shell™

Installation

Steam Game Server relies on SteamCMD to manage the games that you play. We need to begin by making a Steam user on our Linux Shell.

useradd -m steam

Next, we create a home folder for the user and go to that folder.

mkdir /home/steam

cd /home/steam

For 64-bit installation, we must add the multiverse repository.

sudo add-apt-repository multiverse

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

Now update to activate the repository.

sudo apt update

Install steamcmd with the command below:

sudo apt install lib32gcc1 steamcmd

For users on a 32-bit system, you can use the standard repository and begin after creating a home folder on your server for the steam user. Enter:

sudo apt install steamcmd

To run SteamCMD, enter:

cd~

steamcmd

To login anonymously to SteamCMD, use:

login anonymous

Since we are running a dedicated server, it is recommended that we create a new Steam account different from our usual Steam game client account.

Setup and Configuration

First, we must enter the name of the installation directory:

force_install_dir <path>

<path> must lead to a directory made to match the game being installed

Steam assigns both the client and server a number called an AppID.

(Example: Counter-Strike Client AppID - 240, Server AppID: 232330)

Install and update the game server by entering the AppID of your server.

app_update <app_id>

Example for Counter-Strike:

app_update 232330

All you need to do to connect to your Steam Game Server is to run the game on your client PC and wait for your application to automatically detect the server. If it is not automatically detected you can select the multiplayer or network play options. Now go play, have fun.