How I easily made my own GAME SERVER using AMP!
|First off I should make it clear this video is sponsored by CubeCoders, the makers of the AMP. AMP stands for “Application Management Panel”, and is an excellent one-stop-shop for hosting all kinds of custom game servers, from Minecraft to source games like CS:GO, Garry’s Mod and TF2 – and technically anything else as well! This video is intended to be a bit of a getting started guide, walking you through how to set it up, customise your server, then get playing.
Lets start with installation. While you can install it on both Windows and Linux, since you are hosting a game server, it’s generally best to host it on a machine that’ll be running 24/7, and trust me when I tell you Windows isn’t great for that. So, Linux it is! I’ve got a system running Ubuntu 20.04LTS, so lets install it on that. You only need one command, which fetches their install script that does everything for you.
It’ll ask you for a password for the linux user account it’ll make for itself, you can just press enter to have it autogenerate a strong one, or enter one yourself and confirm it. Next, the game server admin account. You can select a different username, or again press enter to use ‘admin’, then enter a good password. This is the account that controls all your servers and server settings, so you don’t want that account compromised.
Then, it will ask you a couple of yes/no questions, you just type ‘y’ or ‘n’ to select. The first asks if you’ll be using Minecraft servers as it will automatically download and install the required version of Java if you are. In my case I’m not so I’ll leave that for now – you can always manually install Java yourself later. The next question is about Steam games, like CS:GO, TF2, Rust and Ark, again yes or no. Then, a question about making use of Docker. Docker is a containerisation tool, basically letting you keep each server in its own little bubble isolated from the other servers, and everything else on your system much like it’s own virtual machine. Making use of docker here is a good idea for more commercial or large scale public access servers. If it’s just you and your friends, it’s likely fine not use it but it’s up to you, I’ll go with no here. And finally, it’ll ask if you want to secure your connection with HTTPS. You must already own a domain name that’s pointed at your server’s IP address to do this, so if you don’t have a domain name free hit n for no here.
Then, hit enter and let it do it’s thing. It doesn’t take all that long, and once it’s done it’ll tell you it’s waiting for first time setup to be completed in a browser, so head to either your domain if you’ve set one up, or the server’s IP address and port 8080 to get started. You’ll be greeted with the first time setup wizard, hit next, and assuming you don’t want to setup AMP to run across multiple machines, hit next again, then enter your license key. You can buy one from cubecoders.com, and it’s a one time fee of just £7.50 for up to 5 instances, or you can get a more advanced license if you’d prefer.
Once you’ve entered your key, and are happy to submit crash reports, click next, then restart, and give it a sec. Then, you are in and ready to start making servers! In my case I’m going to make a CS:GO server. So, click on ‘Create Instance’, pick your game, give it a name, in my case CS:GO1, then hit start instance. It’ll take a sec to spin up, then you can click on it, click ‘Manage’, and start exploring. Head to ‘Source Server Settings’ to manage what map, mode and player count you want, or to the Steam Workshop options to install workshop packages for the server to use – great for prop hunt!
Once you are ready to get started, press the “update” button. This will download all the required files and start the instance for you. Once it’s done downloading and running, it’s ready to join so lets do that and get owned by some bots!
To connect to the server, you can use the “Connect to Server” button in the dash which opens steam for you, and has an icon where you can copy the address. In CSGO to join you can just open the console and type “connect” then the IP address and port, in my case 192.168.1.93:27015. You might also be able to hit find custom server, then “LAN” and join from there.
A quick note, if you want your friends to join your server across the internet rather than on your local network, you’ll need to “port forward” the server on your router. How to do that varies depending on your router so search the name of your router and “port forwarding” to find out how for yours. You can find out what ports to forward by hitting the “edit ports” button on the AMP dashboard so to access the management panel externally it’ll be 8080 and to play on your CSGO server it’ll be 27015.