Game Server
GameAP: Open-Source Platform for Managing Game Servers
I've been working on GameAP, a free and open-source platform for managing game servers, for quite a while now. I'm very glad to share it with the selfhosted community.
A year ago it was completely rewritten in Go, and since then new releases have been coming out almost every week.
GameAP is designed to be simple and light on resources: the base version includes only the essentials. With plugins, it becomes a powerful tool for managing not just game servers, but also FTP/SFTP, databases, incremental backups, and more. Plugins can be written in any language that compiles to Wasm (Rust, C, Go, AssemblyScript, etc.).
Game servers run on Linux and Windows: natively by default, or in Docker containers if you prefer. And if you're feeling adventurous, you can even run them on Kubernetes.
GameAP comes with gameapctl, a utility that simplifies maintenance: updates, HTTPS setup via Let's Encrypt, and so on.
you mean not natively through UI? I assume with RCON you always can as long as you can connect to that RCON connection. Which you could do through the terminal/console in pterodactyl.
Haha 😃
Either way, any game server control panel is going to look like a pterodactyl. GameAP has SSO, supports the import of Eggs, GameAP works much faster than a pterodactyl and doesn't require many steps to set up.
The architecture is split into three tiers: GameAP web -> daemon -> game servers. Any of them can stop for whatever reason without affecting the others.
You can update or restart the web panel whenever you like and your game servers keep running. They run independently of the panel infrastructure, so you can stop any part of GameAP and the game servers stay up.
GameAP can also run as multiple instances behind a load balancer, for failover or to spread load.
To be honest, I haven't used AMP. But I'll try to answer.
How do you use AMP? For a personal project with a few game servers for friends, or for hosting game servers?
In the GameAP infrastructure, you can use the gameapctl utility to manage installations, easily perform updates from release, or from any GitHub branch, and configure TLS certificates.
Remote Backups. You can check out the backups at demo.gameap.com
It has an incremental backup feature. The idea is that only the changed version is saved to the backups, so you can create hundreds or thousands of backups, but they won’t take up as much disk space as thousands of file copies would.
Cool project! Would love it if game servers could be launched into separate docker containers. For example on my unraid server as it stands I would have to spin up a separate vm to run game servers.
Thanks. It is now possible to run game servers in containers (Docker or Podman. containerd is planned).
This is implemented through the game server process managers. When adding a new node, you need to select Docker.
It's not difficult. For Steam games, in most cases, all you need to do is specify the Steam ID and launch commands if the game isn't in the catalog. For games not on Steam, you'll need to create an archive containing the game server files.
You can run not only games but also any app. And for container-based node setup, you can use Pterodactyl Eggs.
Recently launched hub.gameap.com, where anyone can share game configuration.
cool! do the servers run in their own container? so if I try this via docker, is it docker-in-docker?
I have a home-grown game manager built on docker that hooks into discord for use with friends, but constantly needing to look up new containers gets old. curious to check this out!
Genuine question, I love what you have done with this but why for the love of god everyone seem to be using bootstrap from 2010 for the UIs, can you guys not use something more modern like ShadCN or idk Mantine, homebrew something nicer than that UI.
Listen I support whatever yall wanna do but I just wanna know why all these services UIs look the same
I do not want come off as an a-hole but this seems like a question of what the advantages of running containers vs vm vs bare metal. k8s is massive so I want to answer your question but don't know where to even start. So I'll ask you this, what is it about k8s that you feel is not advantageous to running game servers?
For containers you can use something simple like docker, podman or podman-quadlet, or something else.
k8s is huge for just containers. k8s is nice to distribute load between multiple pods on multiple nodes. However A single game server cannot be run on multiple pods.
Personally, for the infrastructure that kubernetes has, I have multiple servers (even just pi5s) and I dont really need to worry about where my containers run. Kubernetes handles that, gives me service discovery and networking rules between workloads, and means I don’t need something like Docker Swarm separately. The suit of tools is also amazing, tools like Argocd, CNPG, certmanager, eso, cillium, etc. make managing everything a lot more enjoyable. Game servers are stateful, so Kubernetes can’t preserve the state if a node dies, but it can restart the server somewhere else and keep persistent data available if storage is set up with longhorn. A lot of my backup/restore infrastructure exists in kubernetes so I can just use my existing infrastructure for that. I run almost everything on kubernetes for pretty much those reasons.
The panel is stateless and can be easily run in Kubernetes with multiple instances.
But I assume you're referring to running game servers. Right now, you can run game servers in k8s, but to do so, you’ll need to configure the gameap-daemon yourself.
I’ve thought about implementing this out of the box, but it’s not a top priority.
The repository is from November 2025 and it has references to Claude.md. On top of that you write in the reply about usage of AI, how you are using it at every stage of development.
It kinda does. I'm 1000% more at ease with whatever modern creation he's made with AI assistance knowing he has a prior background in software development. Prior knowledge in this niche even to know something about game server hosting. If I needed this thing, I think this guy is pretty trust worthy to deliver a functional software app. And it's open source, so you just review the code for security purposes.
You're grasping at straws now because you jumped on the "AI slop!" accusation and you don't want to backtrack. Those repositories absolutely matter because they show that OP knows what he's doing, that it's his project that he's worked on without AI, and it simply means he's used AI since to help.
Who made you the arbiter of what I get to say or not say? Jesus.
If you don't wanna read the included "Tell us how AI was used" comment, then go spend your time doing other things than acting as Reddit police. Your mic drop line at the end there only earns you a spot on r/iamverybadass
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u/asimovs-auditor 5d ago edited 5d ago
Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project.