Terraria Server CDK

This is a project for creating AWS resources to build up and run a Terraria server with CDK.

Example working server can be found here: https://tendermario.github.io/terraria-server-aws

Technology

• GitHub pages
• Tailwind
• AWS cli
• AWS CDK
• AWS for infrastructure
• Docker
• Terraria docker image. I'm using https://hub.docker.com/r/ryshe/terraria/ here but https://hub.docker.com/r/beardedio/terraria looks fine too.

Infrastructure

• API Gateway endpoint to start up, shut down, and get status of EC2 instance
• A lambda that runs those above three actions
• EC2
• VPC and Elastic IP
• CloudWatch Alarms to let you know the server is still running
• SNS Email topic
• S3

Other features

• A frontend page to turn on/off your server
• Backup of the server files to S3 every 10 minutes
• Auto Terraria server start on server boot

Prereq

• aws-cli installed on your system (sudo apt install awscli in ubuntu)
• node, npm
• aws-cdk globally npm install -g aws-cdk
• with your aws credentials set up with aws configure (ref: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-configure-quickstart.html)
  • This sets up the files located in ~/.aws/config / credentials. If you get any of it wrong, you can change it there
  • Usually you should use the region closest to you
  • You should probably create a user in AWS IAM with enough privileges to create many resources, and create a key pair. If you're lazy, you can set Admin privileges to a user and create the key pair under it.
    • This is under: Users > select your user > Security credentials > Access keys > Create access key.
    • Note: Save the name of this keypair, it will be used later in the .env file.

Setup

• Fork this repo

Setup backend and CDK infrastructure

• Run npm i to install all the magic
• Copy .env.example to a new file in the same location named .env - edit the contents to your own details
• Optional: Update bin/terraria-server-aws-stack.ts with the names of the servers you want
• Optional: Add your world file as world.wld in s3-files, and update the config.json to have a server name and password if you want.
  • You can find your world file at: %UserProfile%\Documents\My Games\Terraria\Worlds on Windows
  • If you want it to have a custom world.wld name, you can update the variable in terraria-server-aws-stack.ts
  • All files in s3-files will be uploaded to S3, so if you want to put multiple worlds in there to be accessible from the server, feel free.
• Run cdk synth to create the CloudFormation templates - these are the blueprints for your infrastructure
• Run cdk deploy to put them into your account
• Check the status in the AWS console under CloudFormation. If anything messes up, you can delete it there and try again.
  • This should create the infrastructure mentioned above.
  • If you're changing the cdk, use cdk diff to see what the changes are
  • Note: if you change the EC2 server, it will terminate the old one and spin up a new one. Be sure you back up your world first if need be!
• The above deploy should have an "Outputs" section that has a url like: TerrariaServerStack.TerrariaServerApiEndpoint8D383585 = https://ky331xbqw4.execute-api.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prod/ Note this url.
• The outputs will also show the elastic IP that you will use to log into the Terraria server with

Setup Frontend

• Set up GitHub pages so that you can find this page at yourusername.github.io/terraria-server-aws (or whatever your repo name is)
• Use the above url output and paste it in place of the varaiable of the first line in index.js. This updates the API Gateway endpoints to your own endpoints to call the server statuses.
• Feel free to play around with the styles to make it look better. It uses Tailwind for styles.

Setup server

If you did not place a world file in the s3-files, you should have a server waiting to get logged into at your EC2 instance IP address, but you may also want to:

• Add a password and a ServerName to the config.json with sudo vi ~/terraria/world/config.json

Useful CDK commands

Note: The cdk.json file tells the CDK Toolkit how to execute your app. This isn't set up very intelligently just yet and basically has the default values still.

• cdk synth emits the synthesized CloudFormation template
• cdk diff compare deployed stack with current state
• cdk deploy deploy this stack to your default AWS account/region

Commands I never used, but will share anyway:

• npm run build compile typescript to js
• npm run watch watch for changes and compile
• npm run test perform the jest unit tests

Setting up multiple servers

• Add another new TerrariaServerStack(app, '', {}) to bin/terraria-server-aws-stack.ts.
• Create a folder with index.js and index.html named server-
• Use the different API gateway endpoint in the js file
• Create another folder in s3-files to reference if you want to load a specific world

Todo

• Make the hard-coded endpoint in the JS file be added programatically when building out the cdk and setting up the API Gateway endpoint
• Maybe make a healthcheck
• Add a hook to update the docker version when a new TShock/terraria version comes out, since we can't downgrade Terraria easily
• Add a way to find the IP address when the server is running
• Figure out how to determine if the latest Terraria version doesn't match the latest Terraria server version
• Update server version button (maybe another lambda?)

Manual setup tips

You don't need to do any of this, but it is a rough reference for how to set things up manually on a server:

Useful Docker commands

• docker logs terraria -f Get the terraria logs - I found that t3.micro was not enough and would crash when trying to load up. That's already a full gb of ram, but maybe that's not enough for a medium or large word. t3.small should be ok

Set up terraria on an EC2 instance

Install docker:

Ref: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonECS/latest/developerguide/docker-basics.html

sudo yum update -y
sudo amazon-linux-extras install docker
sudo service docker start
sudo usermod -a -G docker ec2-user

Option 1 - Build the terraria server:

Ref: https://hub.docker.com/r/ryshe/terraria/

Enter the ec2 console and run:

docker run -d --rm --name="terraria" -p 7777:7777 -v $HOME/terraria/world:/root/.local/share/Terraria/Worlds ryshe/terraria:latest -world /root/.local/share/Terraria/Worlds/world.wld -autocreate 3 --log-opt max-size=200m -disable-commands

Option 2 - Move a world to the server and run it:

Enter the ec2 console and run:

mkdir -p $HOME/terraria/world

# Move the world file to ~/terraria/world and reference the .wld file in the below command... something like:
scp -i ~/.ssh/<yourpemfile>.pem "/mnt/c/Users/mvien/OneDrive/Documents/my games/Terraria/Worlds/world.wld" ec2-user@<your ec2 public ip>:~/terraria/world/

docker run --rm -d --name="terraria" -p 7777:7777 -v $HOME/terraria/world:/root/.local/share/Terraria/Worlds ryshe/terraria:latest -world /root/.local/share/Terraria/Worlds/world.wld --log-opt max-size=200m -disable-commands