Quickstart: Create a Game Server

Prerequisites

The following prerequisites are required to create a GameServer:

1. A Kubernetes cluster with the UDP port range 7000-8000 open on each node. Creating the firewall.
2. Agones controller installed in the targeted cluster
3. kubectl properly configured
4. Netcat which is already installed on most Linux/macOS distributions, for windows you can use WSL.

If you don’t have a Kubernetes cluster you can follow these instructions to create a cluster on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Minikube or Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), and install Agones.

For the purpose of this guide we’re going to use the simple-game-server example as the GameServer container. This example is a very simple UDP server written in Go. Don’t hesitate to look at the code of this example for more information.

Objectives

• Create a GameServer in Kubernetes using Agones custom resource.
• Get information about the GameServer such as IP address, port and state.
• Connect to the GameServer.

1. Create a GameServer

Let’s create a GameServer using the following command :

kubectl create -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/googleforgames/agones/release-1.43.0/examples/simple-game-server/gameserver.yaml

You should see a successful output similar to this :

gameserver.agones.dev/simple-game-server-4ss4j created

This has created a GameServer record inside Kubernetes, which has also created a backing Pod to run our simple udp game server code in. If you want to see all your running GameServers you can run:

kubectl get gameservers

It should look something like this:

NAME                       STATE     ADDRESS       PORT   NODE     AGE
simple-game-server-7pjrq   Ready   35.233.183.43   7190   agones   3m

You can also see the Pod that got created by running kubectl get pods, the Pod will be prefixed by simple-game-server.

NAME                        READY     STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
simple-game-server-7pjrq    2/2       Running   0          5m

As you can see above it says READY: 2/2 this means there are two containers running in this Pod, this is because Agones injected the SDK sidecar for readiness and health checking of your Game Server.

For the full details of the YAML file head to the GameServer Specification Guide

2. Fetch the GameServer Status

Let’s wait for the GameServer state to become Ready. You can use the watch tool to see the state change. If your operating system does not have watch, manually run kubectl describe gameserver until the state changes.

watch kubectl describe gameserver

Name:         simple-game-server-7pjrq
Namespace:    default
Labels:       <none>
Annotations:  agones.dev/sdk-version: 0.9.0-764fa53
API Version:  agones.dev/v1
Kind:         GameServer
Metadata:
  Creation Timestamp:  2019-02-27T15:06:20Z
  Finalizers:
    agones.dev/controller
  Generate Name:     simple-game-server-
  Generation:        1
  Resource Version:  30377
  Self Link:         /apis/agones.dev/v1/namespaces/default/gameservers/simple-game-server-7pjrq
  UID:               3d7ac3e1-3aa1-11e9-a4f5-42010a8a0019
Spec:
  Container:  simple-game-server
  Health:
    Failure Threshold:      3
    Initial Delay Seconds:  5
    Period Seconds:         5
  Ports:
    Container Port:  7654
    Host Port:       7190
    Name:            default
    Port Policy:     Dynamic
    Protocol:        UDP
  Scheduling:        Packed
  Template:
    Metadata:
      Creation Timestamp:  <nil>
    Spec:
      Containers:
        Image:  us-docker.pkg.dev/agones-images/examples/simple-game-server:0.35
        Name:   simple-game-server
        Resources:
          Limits:
            Cpu:     20m
            Memory:  32Mi
          Requests:
            Cpu:     20m
            Memory:  32Mi
Status:
  Address:    35.233.183.43
  Node Name:  agones
  Ports:
    Name:  default
    Port:  7190
  State:   Ready
Events:
  Type    Reason          Age   From                   Message
  ----    ------          ----  ----                   -------
  Normal  PortAllocation  34s   gameserver-controller  Port allocated
  Normal  Creating        34s   gameserver-controller  Pod simple-game-server-7pjrq created
  Normal  Scheduled       34s   gameserver-controller  Address and port populated
  Normal  Ready           27s   gameserver-controller  SDK.Ready() executed

If you look towards the bottom, you can see there is a Status > State value. We are waiting for it to move to Ready, which means that the game server is ready to accept connections.

You might also be interested to see the Events section, which outlines when various lifecycle events of the GameServer occur. We can also see when the GameServer is ready on the event stream as well - at which time the Status > Address and Status > Ports > Port have also been populated, letting us know what IP and port our client can now connect to!

Let’s retrieve the IP address and the allocated port of your Game Server :

kubectl get gs

This should output your Game Server IP address and ports, eg:

NAME                       STATE   ADDRESS         PORT   NODE     AGE
simple-game-server-7pjrq   Ready   35.233.183.43   7190   agones   4m

3. Connect to the GameServer

You can now communicate with the Game Server, by running:

nc -u {IP} {PORT}

Now write any text you would like, and hit <Enter>. You should see your text echoed back, like so:

nc -u 35.233.183.43 7190
Hello World !
ACK: Hello World !

You can finally type EXIT and hit <Enter>, which tells the SDK to run the Shutdown command, and therefore shuts down the GameServer.

To exit nc you can press <ctrl>+c.

If you run kubectl describe gameserver again - either the GameServer will be gone completely, or it will be in Shutdown state, on the way to being deleted.

Next Step

If you want to use your own GameServer container make sure you have properly integrated the Agones SDK.