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Running a PokeponServer in a Docker container

If you don't know what Docker is, you'd better have a look here.

TL;DR: it's a software which allows you to run a process - or a bunch of processes - in an isolated environment, pretty much like a Virtual Machine, but not quite. Docker containers are extremely lightweight, can be started and stopped in a few seconds (or less) and can be replicated out of the box on any host equipped with Docker.

What does this mean to me, that only want to run a PokeponServer?

It means you can host a PokeponServer in a secure environment on your Linux machine without bothering installing a dedicated VM. It also mean you can start and stop it as you wish, or start several server instances in a jiffy, pretty much as much as your machine can handle, but with the storage usage of a single one (yup, that's magic. And a clever use of AUFS layered filesystems).

How to use it

  • The first requirement is a Linux host (Mac and Windows are viable too, but you'll need an extra layer called boot2docker, which is actually a minimal Linux VM, so you'd kinda lose all the advantage of not having to install a VM).
  • If the step 1 is satisfied, the following step is installing Docker, either via a package manager or, if you prefer the latest version, from the Docker website Sidenote: on Debian/Ubuntu, the package you need to apt-get is called docker.io, while on RHEL-based distros is just docker.
  • So, if you have successfully installed Docker, open a terminal and ensure its daemon is running. If you installed directly the binary, start the daemon directly with: sudo nohup docker -d & or something like that. Otherwise, you can usually do sudo service docker start or sudo systemctl start docker
  • Once you have the daemon running, you can query it via the docker CLI. More specifically, you'll want to build the PokeponServer image. To do this, you have 2 options:
  1. Recommended: Build a new image from the Dockerfile in this directory. This will ensure you have the latest version of the game. The steps are the following:
  • Create a directory, e.g. ~/pokepon-docker
  • Download the pokepon source code and put it in ~/pokepon-docker, or whatever you called it
  • Copy the Dockerfile directly into ~/pokepon-docker
  • Open a terminal, cd into that directory and issue the command: docker build -t <image_name> .
  • Once completed, you can start your server with docker run -d -p 12344:12344 <image_name>
  1. Else, download the existing PokeponServer image from Docker Hub. This is as simple as running docker run -d -p 12344:12344 silverweed/pokepon_server:latest (You'll need root permissions to do this, unless you add your user to the docker group, which is preferred: groupadd docker && useradd -a -G docker your_username - you'll need to logout and login back). This options is the least preferred, since the server image is often outdated.

For an explanation on the docker run flags, see here, or run docker run with no arguments to see a help message.