Ansible Factorio playbook

An ansible playbook which installs a Factorio headless server on an Ubuntu x64 14.04 server and makes it manageable using upstart (e.g. service factorio start) via factorio-init, including version upgrades via factorio-updater. You still need to upload an initial Factorio save game to the server using e.g. scp.

The instructions are written for an AWS Ubuntu 14.04 server but they should work with other providers as well (see notes on non-AWS servers below).

Usage

Local Setup (skip if you already have ansible >= 2.0 installed)

Make sure you have Python 2 (with the pip and virtualenv packages) and git installed locally already:

sudo apt install -y git python python-dev python-pip
sudo pip install virtualenv

Then install Ansible:

virtualenv .ansible-venv      # create a virtual env to avoid interfering with python packages installed system-wide
. .ansible-venv/bin/activate  # activate the python virtual env for this shell session
pip install ansible           # install ansible into python virtual env

Provision your server!

Assuming you've provisioned a 14.04 server via AWS (see below if using a different provider):

ansible-playbook playbooks/factorio.yml -i 'hostnameofyourserver,' --user ubuntu --become

If it all succeeds, you should be able to SCP up your save game and start your server:

scp my-factorio-savegame.zip ubuntu@hostnameofyourserver:/opt/factorio/saves/
ssh ubuntu@hostnameofyourserver
sudo service factorio help
sudo service factorio start   # loads the most recently modified save into your server
sudo service factorio screen  # view server logs using Screen (press "Ctrl+a, d" to leave Screen)
sudo service factorio stop    # should save the game and quit (but make a client-side save just in case)
sudo service factorio update  # updates factorio server to latest version using factorio-updater

See https://github.com/Bisa/factorio-init for more info on the init script
See https://github.com/narc0tiq/factorio-updater for more info on the factorio update command

Troubleshooting

Check ansible can talk to your server (by running ifconfig):

ansible -a 'ifconfig' -i 'hostnameofyourserver,' --user ubuntu -vvvvv all

If that still doesn't work, try with ansible debug output switched on:

ANSIBLE_DEBUG=true ansible -a 'ifconfig' -i 'hostnameofyourserver,' --user ubuntu -vvvvv all

Make sure ansible can use sudo:

ansible -a 'ifconfig' -i 'hostnameofyourserver,' --user ubuntu -vvvvv all --become

If starting Factorio fails, then try running it directly

sudu -u factorio bash
/opt/factorio/bin/x64/factorio --start-server /opt/factorio/saves/my-factorio-savegame.zip

Using with non-AWS servers

The usage instructions above assume you can SSH to your server using the ubuntu user without a password (i.e. your SSH public key is already authorised for the ubuntu user), and that the Ubuntu user has sudo permission without needing to enter a password for sudo. This configuration matches an AWS 14.04 instance at time of writing.

I don't test with other configurations, but that aside, you should be able to use the following tweaks:

If you want to log in as root, you should specify --user root
If you don't want your user account to use sudo (e.g. using root login), then leave off --become
If sudo requires a password, include --ask-become-pass as an argument
If you need to use a password to authenticate over SSH, include --ask-pass as an argument