Ansible plays for deploying and managing a Valheim server on Amazon Web Services.

The server is powered by the brilliant scripts developed by Nimdy/ZeroBandwidth. As an alternative to this guide, check out their guide (linked above) and use their DigitalOcean referral code.

We need a Python environment with ansible, boto, etc. installed.

Note that we have pinned ansible to 2.9.9. Everything likely works with anisble, 2.10, but I haven't tried it.

# From the root of this project
python3 -m venv env  # create a virtualenv in env/
source env/bin/activate  # activate the virtualenv
pip install -r requirements.txt

cp ansible/ansible/config/secrets.yaml.example ansible/ansible/secrets.yaml

We need credentials for the AWS API. To obtain them log in to your AWS console and follow the instructions. Choose a programmatic access option and apply the AdministratorAccess policy to give administrative access to your API (or some more narrow set of privileges if you're being properly circumspect).

Put your newly created IAM credentials in a file that we will source later (e.g. valheim_aws_rc):

echo "export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=<your key_id>" >> ~/valheim_aws_rc
echo "export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=<your secret key>" >> ~/valheim_aws_rc
source ~/valheim_aws_rc

Create a copy of ansible/src/aws/credentials.example called credentials and fill in your access key ID and secret access key:

cp ansible/src/aws/credentials.example ansible/src/aws/credentials
vim ansible/src/aws/credentials  # fill it in

Go to the Key Pairs section on the EC2 dashboard and click "Create Key Pair". Select "pem" as the file format. Download the .pem file when prompted and place it somewhere you'll remember.

In secrets.yaml,

• edit the value of aws_key_location to the location you just downloaded the .pem file to (either an absolute path or relative to secrets.yaml).
• edit the value of aws_ssh_key to contain the name of the key pair.

This is necessary so that ansible can connect to the server that we will be creating.

ssh-add <path to .pem file>

We'll assign an Elastic IP to our server so that we can easily terminate and recreate it without having to change the IP players connect to.

In the EC2 dashboard, go to the Elastic IPs section. Click Allocate Elastic IP address. Add a tag to the EIP with the key valheim (you don't need to set a value).

Go to the Your VPCs section of your VPC dashboard. Either create a dedicated VPC for your server, or use an existing one. Note the VPC ID . Open secrets.yaml and set the vpc_id value.

The server will automatically backup your world (and restart the Valheim server) at 0 and 12 UTC every day. The backups will be stored in an S3 bucket. You need to choose a name for the S3 bucket that is unique across all S3 buckets. Go to secrets.yaml and set the bucket value to something unique (e.g. valheim_backups followed by a random string).

Fill out values for display_name, world_name, user_password, and password under server. Should be reasonably self-explanatory. Don't use special characters.

If you want your server to use an existing world, you need to create a tar.gz archive containing the .db and .fwl files for it. On Windows, the default world save location is C:\Users\(Your PC Username)\AppData\LocalLow\IronGate\Valheim\worlds. There will be file pairs like world1.db and world1.fwl in it. For the world you want to resume, copy the pair to a directory. Then, create a tarball containing just these two files and put the resulting tarball in its own directory (e.g. world1-backups):

mkdir world1-backups
tar -czf world1-backups/world1-backup.tar.gz -C <directory containing world1.{db, fwl}> . 

In secrets.yaml, set initial_world_local_path to the absolute path of the directory containing the tarball (in the above example, world1-backups).

If you have previously run a server using this guide, there should be backups in the bucket you created above in a subdirectory named after world_name (so, e.g., s3:/valheim_backups-d34db33f/world1/). In that case, set initial_world_s3_path to e.g. world1 or whatever the name of the subdirectory is that contains the backup tarballs. The most recent tarball will be restored.

You should now be ready to launch the server.

ansible-playbook setup-play.yaml

That's it! If everything went well, you should now have a working server that you can connect to on port 2456 at the Elastic IP you created above. If not, please create an issue.

ssh -F ansible/ansible/ssh_config worker0

ansible-playbook -i aws_ec2.yaml cleanup-play.yaml

Note that as with the automated backups, this will restart the Valheim server.

ansible-playbook -i aws_ec2.yaml backup-play.yaml