Ansible setup CS server

Creating and configuring a dedicated server can be a daunting task. Sometimes you just want to play without thinking about the system behind the server. That is why I made a couple scripts to configure and launch a Counter Srike dedicated server with Ansible for Source (CSS) and Global Offensive (CS:GO).

Why Ansible?

Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool that runs on Mac, Windows and Linux. It can configure softwares and deploy them on many servers at once with a single little script.

Here is the link to install Ansible.

Architecture

There is five playbooks in this project:

• setup_users.yml
• setup_system.yml
• setup_css.yml
• setup_csgo.yml
• setup_from_scratch.yml

The scripts should work easily on CentOS / RedHat / Fedora. A few ajustements need to be made in order to make it work on Ubuntu/Debian.

The group cs_servers is used to reference your server(s). You can replace my-server-name.com with your server name or ip in the inventory file.

setup_users.yml

This script will make sure that the designated users in group_vars/cs_server.yml are created and that their keys are setup to connect without password. In this project there are two users, a superuser called centos and a steam user that will run the services (No keys or password will be set for this user).

setup_system.yml

This script installs and configures the firewall firewalld, open the needed ports for the game, restricts ssh access with a key and forbid root ssh connections. This script is optional and was created only to follow server security best practices.

setup_css.yml

This script installs SteamCMD if not already and use it to download Counter Strike Source. It then creates a systemd service that will launch the server.

Warning: The download speed can be really slow sometimes. The script will download about 2G. It can take a couple hours to finish.

setup_csgo.yml

This script installs SteamCMD if not already and use it to download Counter Strike Global Offensive. It then creates a systemd service that will launch the server.

Warning: The download speed can be really slow sometimes. The script will download about 24G (Last time I checked). It can take a couple hours to finish. (Took me a night...)

setup_from_scratch.yml

This script executes all the scripts above in the same order if you want to install CSS and CS:GO.

Launch scripts

Once you modified ansible.cfg, group_vars/cs_servers.yml and inventory you can execute the playbooks you want like this: ansible-playbook playbook.yml

e.g. ansible-playbook setup_csgo.yml