Setting Up A Half-Life 2 Server On CentOS 6

This tutorial will cover the process of installing a Half-Life 2 game server on CentOS 6 System.

Step 1: Installing The Prerequisites

To set up our Half-Life 2 server, we’ll need to install SteamCMD (Steam’s game server client) and its requirements.

On a 32-bit CentOS installation:

yum install glibc libstdc++

On a 64-bit CentOS installation:

yum install glibc.i686 libstdc++.i686

That’s all SteamCMD requires (the libraries required to compile C++ code and execute it).

Lastly, for this step, we’ll install a Linux utility called screen screen, which allows us to keep the gameserver running process even after we disconnect from our SSH prompt.

yum install screen

Step 2: Setting up SteamCMD

Moving on, for security purposes, we will be creating another user to run the game server. Execute the following:

useradd -m gameserver

Before we drop our root privileges, we need to open up some base ports to allow players to connect.

iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 27015 -j ACCEPT
iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 27020 -j ACCEPT
service iptables save
service iptables restart

Now, log in as your new user account:gameserver.

su gameserver

The next step will be downloading the libraries needed for SteamCMD:

mkdir SteamCMD
cd SteamCMD
wget https://steamcdn-a.akamaihd.net/client/installer/steamcmd_linux.tar.gz

And extract the archive:

tar xvf steamcmd_linux.tar.gz

Now that SteamCMD is installed, we can move forward to installing the game server.

Step 3: Installing and configuring Half-Life 2

Execute ./steamcmd.sh:

./steamcmd.sh

Executing the above command will allow Steam to self-update. Once updated, you will see the Steam > prompt. You will then log in to the Steam Server:

login anonymous

Next, install the halflife2 server:

force_install_dir ./halflife2
app_update 238430 validate
exit

The above command will install Half-Life 2’s server file to the directory specified above within your SteamCMD Directory.

The next step would be to configure the server:

cd halflife2

Open up your text editor to cfg/server.cfg:

nano cfg/server.cfg

Add the following:

// Half Life 2 configuration
hostname "Half Life 2 Server"

Change the contents between the double quotes to your desired hostname.

The next and final step would be to start the server:

Step 4: Running The Half-Life 2 Game Server

Follow the steps below to start the server:

cd /home/gameserver/SteamCMD/halflife2/ 
screen
./srcds_run -game hl2mp +port 27020 +map dm_lockdown +maxplayers 8 -autoupdate

This concludes our tutorial. Thank you for reading.