How to: Install and Use SteamCMD on Ubuntu Linux

TABLE OF CONTENTS

• Preparation Steps
• Installation
• Conclusion

We love video games, who doesn’t? With SkySilk Cloud, you can host your own game servers for yourself and all of your friends. We’re going to cover using SteamCMD to host Dedicated Servers for games like ARK, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Garry’s Mod, and more.

SteamCMD also-known-as the Steam Console Client is a purely command-line version of the Steam Client. Most users utilize this tool to install and update dedicated game servers that use the SteamPipe content delivery system. It ended up replacing the now deprecated HLDSUpdateTool in the end. 

Preparation Steps

First off, we’re going to make sure that we set everything up in a secure manner. Let’s do that by creating a separate user so isolate SteamCMD from the rest of our machine. We’re then going to navigate to its home directory. (It’s heavily advised to NOT run SteamCMD as your root user as this is a security risk.)

sudo useradd -m steam

Cd /home/steam

If you’re using a 64-bit machine run the following commands one by one. These will make sure your system is up to date with the latest packages and dependencies, and add the multiverse repository:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

sudo apt install software-properties-common

sudo add-apt-repository multiverse

sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

sudo apt update

sudo apt install lib32gcc1 steamcmd

Now we’re going to link the steamcmd executable file:

ln -s /usr/games/steamcmd steamcmd

We will switch to our new steam user with:

su steam

From this user’s home directory, use the following command:

steamcmd

Most people are going to be able to log in anonymously, however, there are some games that require logging into a Steam account that owns the content specifically for that server.

login anonymous

If you do need to use an account, you can use:

login <steamusername>

When logged in we will need to set an installation directory for our server.

force_install_dir <server/path/here>

We’re going to use the Killing Floor 2 Dedicated Server files in this example. You can find a list of the other game server IDs → https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/Steam_Application_IDs

app_update 232130 validate

This process will take some time depending on which application you chose to install. Once it’s done working you can safely log off of the steam servers by using the quit command:

quit

That’s it. We’ve installed SteamCMD and used it to install our first game server. This was in no way an extensive list of everything that you can achieve using SteamCMD. For those who prefer to use a graphical interface, you may consider installing a Game Server Manager instead. Two examples are LinuxGSM and Pterodactyl Panel.

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