How to host a Rust server in Linux
Ever wondered how to make your own server but couldn’t due to the OS restriction to Windows? Well fear no more! This section of the guide will focus on the realm of Linux but more particularly on the Debian 8 x64 distribution. Rather than solely being focused on vanilla Rust I will also branch into Oxide and security of your server itself.
Initial Setup
This bit will be the longest part of the guide but will serve you well in terms of the security of your server. This will be mainly focused on people who aren’t familiar in terms of security or Debian in general.
- Login to your server through SSH (PuTTY is recommended).
- Head over to a PasswordGenerator site and generate a random password with a length of 50+ and copy it. Then type “passwd root” and then right click twice in the terminal.
- Now your root password is secure you need to update the software by doing “apt-get update -y && apt-get upgrade -y” then “apt-get install fail2ban nano -y”.
- Now download PuTTYgen then generate the key. Now type all of these individually on a per line basis in PuTTY:
chmod 0644 ~/.ssh/authorized_keys
Now head back to PuTTYgen then right click inside the box with lots of characters and press select all then copy. Now head back to PuTTY where you left off at the nano editor and right click to paste your public key in then do ctrl+o -> enter -> ctrl+x.
Now type “nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config” then ctrl+w then “PasswordAuth” then enter. Now remove the hash and change the yes at the end to a no. Now page down to the bottom and change UsePAM to no. Now ctrl+w and do type PermitRootLogin and simply change it to “without-password”. Now press ctrl+p (save) and ctrl+x (exit) and then finally type “service ssh reload”
Now you just need to open PuTTYgen back open and save the public and private key in a folder somewhere safe. Now close PuTTY and reopen it then simply on the left side goto Connection -> SSH -> Authentication then browse and select your private key file that you just saved. Once you’ve done that head back to Session then click Default Settings then Save then open for a passwordless login.
SteamCMD
Valve have their own documentation for setting up SteamCMD you can find this here. Once your at app_update section you type “app_update 258550”.
Rust legacy server linux
This guide goes over how to create an old Rust server on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), for free, using their Compute Engine feature.
I take no responsibility for your actions outside of what I have written in this tutorial.
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This guide goes over how to create a free dedicated Rust server for any version of the game. I tried making it as user friendly as possible, so anyone can follow along. You can probably get through the whole thing by just copy and pasting all of the commands shown, but I definitely think you should read everything for a better understanding.
The method used in this guide takes advantage of Google Cloud’s free trial, so in saying that the servers will only last for 3 months unfortunately, but you can probably transfer the files to a new account before the trial expires. Using GCP is good just to get a better understanding of the inner workings of a server while playing with friends, I wouldn’t recommend using it as a primary host because there are cheaper alternatives.
This guide can be applied to any version of Rust, but I 100% recommend just using Linux Game Server Manager if you want the most up-to-date version, it is way easier to set up and has more customizability in terms of plugins.
- Create or use a fresh Gmail account that has never bought or used a free trial for GCP.
- On the left side of the page, click on ”Compute Engine” and wait for it to get ready. Don’t worry about the quickstart as we are not going to use that.
Note: Different regions have different prices due to cost, hardware, manpower, etc. So some places may be a bit more expensive than others, this won’t really affect you in the short term.
Alternatively you can use whatever OS you are comfortable with (some exceptions), but I am not going over how to use anything other than CentOS.
Note: RHEL, SLES, Windows and SQL servers cannot be used in GCP free tier.
- At the top left of the page, open the sidebar by clicking the 3 horizontal lines.
- Name Change this to whatever, something like “rust-ports” will do.
- Targets Click the drop down and change this to “All instances in the network”.
- Source IP ranges In this field put “0.0.0.0/0”
- Protocols and ports Tick the tcp box and put “28016” in the box to the right of it, tick udp and put “28015” in the box to the right of it.
If you are inexperienced with using a terminal then now is the time to pay the most attention, this part probably takes the longest and can easily be problematic.
Anything in a code block should be pasted into the terminal
- Open the CentOS terminal by clicking “SSH” to the right of the instance you’ve made.