Sandstorm Admin Wrapper

About

Sandstorm Admin Wrapper (SAW) is a set of tools designed to ease the burden of hosting one or more servers for the New World Interactive video game Insurgency: Sandstorm. It is comprised of a Ruby webserver (Sinatra) and associated tools which provide an easy-to-use browser front-end for configuring and managing a server on either Linux or Windows.

It can also be used to remotely monitor and administer servers via RCON.

Screenshot

Features

An easy-to-use webserver with configurable parameters via TOML file (and web interface):

• Bind IP/Port
• SSL Enabled
• Verify SSL Enabled
• Cert/Key Paths
• Session secret

Local server features:

• Server Setup page
  • Guides you through installing SteamCMD manually
  • Detects SteamCMD installation and server installation
  • Shows available server update
  • Provides a simple interface to install and manually update/verify the server files as well as enable automatic update
  • SteamCMD log (see known issue below for Windows)
• Server Config page
  • Supports multiple server configurations
  • Easy-to-use configuration options for your servers
  • Blurring/redaction of sensitive information
  • Dropdowns for enumerated settings
  • Editable config files (Paste your current settings here! Matching settings above will override what was entered.)
    • Game.ini
    • Engine.ini
    • Admins.txt
    • MapCycle.txt
    • Bans.json
    • Local copies of these files are stored in sandstorm-admin-wrapper/server-config. Before launching the server, the manual config is applied to the server-config files, then those files are copied into the appropriate places in order for the server to use them. This prevents the server from overwriting our changes. After the server closes, any new bans are added to the local copy.
• Server Control page
  • Select from saved configs or running servers
  • Server status
  • Start/Restart/Stop buttons
  • Detailed PID and process exit toasts
  • Thread, player, and bot counts
  • Player list (with kick/ban buttons and editable reason)
  • Chat log with chat input (RCON say)
  • RCON log with RCON input
  • Server log with download options
• Server Status page
  • List of all running servers with their metadata and players

Extra tools:

• Remote Monitor Tool
  • Allows monitoring and administration of servers when provided with valid IP, Query Port, RCON Port, and RCON Password
  • Shows server, query, and RCON status, player list with admin functionality, and RCON console.
  • Can spawn multiple server monitors and switch between them at will
  • Can save configurations for easy monitoring later
  • If a third party hosts your server(s) for you, this is probably what you're looking for
• RCON Tool
  • Allows remote RCON commands (with the given IP, port, and password).
• SteamCMD Tool
  • This tool allows passthrough to the SteamCMD installation. This could be useful for installing/updating other games, etc.

Wrapper webserver features:

• Config page
  • Easy configuration for all webserver parameters
  • Button to download SAW logs
  • Button to update SAW to the latest version (restart required)
  • Button to restart the webserver (to apply changes)
• Users page
  • Easy addition/modification of users to allow access to server admin features.
  • Protections to prevent removing the last Host (and therefore losing access to webserver self-configuration and user configuration)
  • User roles:
    • Host: Server host; can configure webserver, users, and everything else
    • Admin: Server admin; can do everything except configure the webserver and users
    • Moderator: Server moderator; can kick and ban users via the status page
    • User: Read-only role which can access basic account features and the server status page
  • New users have a random password automatically generated; this (along with the user name) is given to the user by the host. Upon first login, users are asked to change their password. This helps keep passwords private.
• Log page
  • Shows live user authentication and incoming request information

User features:

• Change password
• Log out

Command-line parameters:

• CLI parameters are passed from the start script (linux_start.sh/windows_start.bat) to admin-interface/lib/webapp.rb
• SAW supports the following command-line parameter(s)
  • --start/-s [server_config_name_or_id]
    • Example: -s 'My Server 1' -s 'My Server 2' -s 'ebfc1f5a-ee68-45ab-9248-6f425f6d587d'
    • Start one or more servers automatically with the named configuration (matched based on Config Name or Config ID). This can be used in combination with system startup scripts (e.g. systemd unit example in extras/systemd) or Windows Task Scheduler to run your server(s) on boot.
  • --log-level/-l [log_level]
    • Example: -l debug
    • Sets the log level. Only messages at or above the set level are printed to STDOUT; all logs are still written to admin-interface/log/sandstorm-admin-wrapper.log. One of: debug, info, warn, error, fatal

Prerequisites

• Windows (10 tested) or Linux (Debian 9 tested)
• A Ruby 3.1.2+ (check with ruby -v) installation with the Bundler gem (gem install bundler). I recommend rbenv to manage Ruby installations on Linux and RubyInstaller for Windows to install Ruby on Windows (download Ruby+Devkit).
• If using this tool to run a server, grab a portable version of SteamCMD (we'll extract it to sandstorm-admin-wrapper/steamcmd/installation)
  • Windows SteamCMD
  • Linux SteamCMD
• Ensure the Insurgency: Sandstorm server prerequisites are installed (Windows):
  • Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=53587
  • Visual C++ 2017 Redistributable: https://aka.ms/vs/15/release/vc_redist.x64.exe

Installation

• Download and extract (or clone) the repository
• If you plan to install/run a server, install SteamCMD manually to sandstorm-admin-wrapper/steamcmd/installation. steamcmd.exe/steamcmd.sh should be in the installation directory.
  • During runtime, we change the wrapper's HOME environment variable to sandstorm-admin-wrapper/steamcmd in order to contain SteamCMD's home directory pollution (on Linux) within the wrapper. You may see shell or Steam-related files in this directory as a result.

Docker instructions are also available.

Starting the Admin Wrapper

• Run the start script for your OS (windows_start.bat for Windows, linux_start.sh for Linux (BASH))
• Navigate to the web interface in your browser (e.g. https://localhost:51422/)
• Log in with the default admin credentials (admin/password). You will be prompted to set a new password for the admin account. If you ever forget this password, just delete admin-interface/config/users.json and restart the webserver to regenerate the default admin/password account.
• If running a server
  • Follow the instructions on the Server -> Setup to install the Sandstorm server (refresh may be required to show installed status)
  • Configure the server via the Server -> Config page
  • Run the server via the Server -> Control page
• If administrating remote server(s)
  • Use the Tools -> Monitor page

Useful information

• How the live server/RCON/SteamCMD logs work:
  • When starting the server process, SteamCMD, or executing RCON, we create a buffer object to hold data, bookmarks, and a status/message upon completion. The browser requests the appropriate buffer to obtain data to fill the log. The webserver provides a set amount of the buffer's data (to not overload the client) and provides a bookmark (UUID) which internally points to a specific index in the buffer's data. Once all the data is read and a status is available, the status and message are sent to the client and tailing is complete.
  • When reloading a page containing a server log, you may see the server log scroll again. This is because we are loading the buffered data from the beginning of the buffer's data array again and receiving it in chunks. Ideally we will cache that information in the future or change the tailing implementation.
• Used protocols:
  • RCON (TCP)
    • The RCON server used by Insurgency: Sandstorm has some unresolved issues. As such, the RCON client found in this repository is customized to best work with Insurgency: Sandstorm and will likely not work well with other RCON-enabled servers (just like other RCON clients don't work well with Insurgency: Sandstorm).
  • Server Query (UDP)
    • We use the A2S_INFO, A2S_PLAYER, and A2S_RULES server queries.

Known issues

These are the currently known issues. If you can fix any of these or know what to do, please send a pull request or create a detailed GitHub issue. Thanks!

• SteamCMD output on Windows takes forever!
  • SteamCMD buffers progress output when it doesn't detect an interactive session (i.e. when it's being run by sandstorm-admin-wrapper). This output doesn't become available until the update/validation completes. There is a workaround we're using for Linux (PTY) to emulate an interactive session, but such a workaround does not appear to be feasible on Windows at this time. (more info here)
• Sometimes RCON output only appears in the RCON-specific log (not the server log)!
  • The server process sometimes only writes the RCON-related log messages to Insurgency.log (while writing all its other logging to Insurgency_[0-9].log). When this happens, the RCON-related log messages aren't even sent to STDOUT, which is what we use to populate the server log. As such, we also tail Insurgency.log for any RCON messages to add to the RCON-specific log to ensure they're still visible when this server bug occurs.

Donate

If you'd like to show your appreciation of Sandstorm Admin Wrapper, please donate via PayPal (or suggest other methods).

Contact

Join the unofficial Insurgency: Sandstorm Community Server Hosts Discord! We'd love to help you with any server hosting questions/issues you may have.