Recently, I have been playing a game called Don’t Starve Together with my wife.  I wanted to play with setting up a dedicated server and followed the very well made guide at Don’t Starve Together Game Wikia Dedicated Server Setup

But at the end of setting things up, I didn’t like that it was being run using screen instead of a proper managed process that would start on a reboot.  Since I run Cent7 on my server, it was actually super easy to get this going with systemd.  I have messed with setting up init scripts before, but systemd made things way easier to get going.  Below is a paste of the systemd unit file I came up with.

[Unit]
Description=Don't Starve Together Server
After=network.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/home/steam/dontstarve/bin/dontstarve_dedicated_server_nullrenderer
GuessMainPID=no
Type=simple
User=steam
Group=steam
WorkingDirectory=/home/steam/dontstarve/bin

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Most of the file is pretty self explanatory, but the main things I had to change was the Type from fork to simple, and I had to set the WorkingDirectory to where the binary was installed.  For some reason, it fails to start if you don’t set that.  The last thing I had to do was like a “systemctl enable dontstarve“.  You may or may not have to also do a “systemctl daemon-reload“.  I know I had to several times when I was making edits to the file to get it just right.

Lastly, I made a script to update it nightly and added it into cron.  Below is that script:

#!/bin/bash
systemctl stop dontstarve
su - steam -c "/home/steam/updatedontstarve.sh"
systemctl start dontstarve

And then I made one more script to send an email everyday with a list of the users that connected to the service that day.  Again, this was made super simple due to journalctl.  I know a lot of people are down on that part of systemctl, but I found it a bit easier to get what I wanted vs having to pull it from a normal syslog file.

#!/bin/bash
/bin/journalctl --since today | grep joined | mailx -s "Today's Don't Starve Together players" root@localhost