Local Game Server

You can register a local game server with Agones. This means you can run an experimental build of your game server in the Agones environment without the need of packaging and deploying it to a fleet. This allows you to quickly iterate on your game server code while still being able to plugin to your Agones environment.

Register your server with Agones

To register your local game server you’ll need to know the IP address of the machine running it and the port. With that you’ll create a game server config like the one below.

apiVersion: "agones.dev/v1"
kind: GameServer
metadata:
  name: my-local-server
  annotations:
    # Causes Agones to register your local game server at 192.1.1.2, replace with your server's IP address.
    agones.dev/dev-address: "192.1.1.2"
spec:
  ports:
  - name: default
    portPolicy: Static
    hostPort: 17654
    containerPort: 17654
  # The following is ignored but required due to validation.
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: simple-game-server
        image: us-docker.pkg.dev/agones-images/examples/simple-game-server:0.35

Once you save this to a file make sure you have kubectl configured to point to your Agones cluster and then run kubectl apply -f dev-gameserver.yaml. This will register your server with Agones.

Local Game Servers has a few limitations:

• PortPolicy must be Static.
• The game server is not managed by Agones. Features like autoscaling, replication, etc are not available.

When you are finished working with your server, you can remove the registration with kubectl delete -f dev-gameserver.yaml

Next Steps:

• Review the specification of GameServer.
• Read about GameServer allocation.
  • Review the flow of how allocation is done.
  • Review the specification of GameServerAllocation.
  • Check out the Allocator Service as a richer alternative to GameServerAllocation.
• Learn how to connect your local development game server binary into a running Agones Kubernetes cluster for even more live development options with an out of cluster dev server.