Me and my gamer buddies wanted to play games. I had an old 2014 Mac Mini laying around and I was able to setup a headless Ubuntu server that was able to SSH into. Despite the machine being 11 years old and only having a small amount of soldered RAM and an after-market 1TB SSD, it was working perfectly!
Then we eventually "beat" the game and the some of the group wanted to make some changes ("7 Days to Die" in case anyone was wondering which game). Some players wanted to finish out the server to 100% their achievements, others wanted a new map but with the upcoming Beta release of the game, some wanted mods, etc. Either way, I was trying to think about ways to accommodate all of these requests while keeping the game manageable. I...
Me and my gamer buddies wanted to play games. I had an old 2014 Mac Mini laying around and I was able to setup a headless Ubuntu server that was able to SSH into. Despite the machine being 11 years old and only having a small amount of soldered RAM and an after-market 1TB SSD, it was working perfectly!
Then we eventually "beat" the game and the some of the group wanted to make some changes ("7 Days to Die" in case anyone was wondering which game). Some players wanted to finish out the server to 100% their achievements, others wanted a new map but with the upcoming Beta release of the game, some wanted mods, etc. Either way, I was trying to think about ways to accommodate all of these requests while keeping the game manageable. I did some googling and found out about Docker and Portainer.
This looked like a great solution! I backed up the world folder to my PC using WinSCP and tried to install Docker over-top of the existing setup. It didn't work. I then did a clean install of Ubuntu, installed Docker before anything else, and installed Portainer and was able to get into the web management portal; so far so good.
Here is where the issues began. I'm running into all sorts of issues with getting the original world to work. I can get the game to load a new default map with default configs. I feel like I have no control over the files like they're just out of my reach. The game can run but after my hours of tinkering and frustrations, I can't even get THAT to work (the game just keeps reinstalling itself every time I run it).
I think I have a fundamental misunderstanding about how containers, Docker, and Portainer work, especially in regard to hosting game servers. I want to run multiple (really two) versions of the game at the same time but a barebones install seems to be tricky there too. I tried asking AI to help but it's running me in circles with things I've already tried (manually writing the serverconfig.xml, playing with all sorts of settings in the docker-compose.yml, etc)
Any advise or resources anyone have or could suggest to help out this noob-homelab-haver/game-enjoyer would be greatly appreciated.
TL;DR: I don't know how Docker works in regards to hosting multple instances of the same game and I want to learn; please share learning resources or provide advice.