fctrl - All-in-one Factorio server management

fctrl is a tool to manage your Factorio multiplayer server.

THIS IS A WORK IN PROGRESS

Features

• Fully managed installation and upgrade process of the Factorio headless server software
• Server configuration, including admin list, multiplayer white/ban lists, and the advanced settings in server-settings.json
• Mod management, including changing mod settings
• RCON terminal
• Server log capture and ingestion
• A convenient Web UI for all the above!

Usage (Docker)

fctrl is designed to be run on Docker, and a docker-compose.yml file is provided for ease of use.

Requirements:

• Docker
• Docker Compose

Installation:

1. From the repository root, download the docker-compose.yml file and the .env file to the same location.
2. If desired, configure the values in .env.
3. Run docker-compose up -d.

Usage (Linux)

Alternatively, you can run fctrl without Docker, on Linux (not tested on any other OS). This is not recommended due to the many depedencies required, and binaries are not provided so you will have to build from source.

Requirements:

• Cargo and a nightly build of Rust
• Clang/LLVM
• Java 11
• NodeJS, NPM, and Angular CLI installed globally

Installation:

1. Clone the repository, or download a .zip of the source code and extract.
2. Run npm install to restore Node-based build tools.
3. In the web directory, run npm install to restore dependencies for the Angular build, then run ng build --configuration production to build the web interface.
4. Configure the values in .env, then apply them by running source .env.
5. To run the agent application, run cargo run --release --bin agent.
6. To run the management web server, run cargo run --release --bin mgmt-server.

Architecture

fctrl consists of two runtime applications: agent and mgmt-server.

agent

agent is responsible for managing the actual Factorio executable and its dependencies, including installation and launching of the application itself, saves, config files, and mods. It interfaces with a running Factorio process by capturing the process stdout/stderr as well as through an RCON communication channel.

agent is controlled via a WebSocket API, which is how the above functionality is exposed. Logs and output from the Factorio process are also streamed via WebSocket to any connected clients. In your typical setup, the only WebSocket client would be the mgmt-server.

agent is built as a Rust application, and has no additional runtime dependencies.

mgmt-server

mgmt-server serves as the interface between the user and the agent application. It does this by providing a web-based interface with which users can control the operation of the agent. The user-facing components of mgmt-server can be broken into two components:

• A "friendly" web frontend, created using Angular.
• A backend application serving the static frontend and a mixed REST / WebSocket API, written in Rust.

The mixed REST / WebSocket API provided by the backend portion of mgmt-server is a user-friendly encapsulation of the functionality exposed by the agent's WebSocket API. TODO example

The backend application of mgmt-server also acts as a log ingestion service for the agent - logs streamed from the agent are stored in a RocksDB database for future perusal.