This guide will cover the installation and operation of your Arma 3 server using SteamCMD and screen. For additional information regarding the configuration, please visit the Bohemia Interactive Wiki or forums.

Requirements

• ~15 minutes of time.
• Ubuntu server running 14.04 or 14.10.
• A basic understanding of Linux commands.
• A valid steam account. This account doesn’t need to have purchased Arma 3.
• AKLWEB Host VPS (2 CPU, 2GB Memory, 40GB Storage) as a minimum. This configuration may not be suitable for large servers.

Installation

Login as root on the server you will be using for this installation.

We’ll start by acquiring any additional dependencies for both the Arma 3 server and SteamCMD.

Firstly, run the command below to update your server’s list of available packages from the repositories and then upgrade any existing packages.

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

The Arma 3 server requires lib32stdc++6 which can be installed using:

apt-get install lib32stdc++6

SteamCMD requires lib32gcc1 which can be installed using:

apt-get install lib32gcc1

Screen is often times included with the OS image by default, but you may be required to install it yourself.

apt-get install screen

For security purposes, we do not want to run the server using the root account, so we’ll create a new user named “arma3” with the following command:

useradd arma3

Since we don’t want to block terminal usage while the Arma 3 server is running, we’ve installed screen to allow the server to run on another screen, but we still have to allow our new user arma3 to use screen by running:

chmod o+rw /dev/pts/0

Now that we have acquired all system dependencies, we can now switch to the arma3 user account to start creating some folders and install SteamCMD.

su arma3

As you may of noticed, we are still in the root user’s home directory so lets change over to the arma3 home.

cd ~

To keep our folder structure clean and simple, we’ll create a new folder for SteamCMD and another for the Arma 3 server files.

mkdir steam
mkdir arma3
cd steam

Now that our two folders have been created and we have changed directories to the steam folder, lets download and install SteamCMD using the following commands.

1. Download the SteamCMD executable.

   wget http://media.steampowered.com/client/steamcmd_linux.tar.gz
   

2. Extract the contents to the directory.

   tar -xvzf steamcmd_linux.tar.gz
   

3. Remove the tar file.

   rm -f steamcmd_linux.tar.gz
   

4. Run and update SteamCMD.

   ./steamcmd.sh
   

Now that we have SteamCMD up and running, lets login to our steam account. Replace user and pass with your steam username and password.

login user pass

Once we login, we can then install Arma 3 to the arma3 directory.

force_install_dir ../arma3
app_update 233780

Once it finishes downloading, you can close SteamCMD by typing in exit. Since we now have the Arma 3 server downloaded, we can now start it by changing to the arma3 directory.

cd ../arma3

… and then starting a new screen to start the server, where armaserver is the screen name.

screen -S armaserver

Run the Arma 3 server. Additional launch parameters can be found on the Bohemia Interactive Wiki.

./arma3server

You can also return to the main screen by hitting Ctrl + A, then D. If you wish to return to the server console, you can do so by using the command below (where “armaserver” is your screen name).

screen -r armaserver

You can close your Arma 3 server at any time by hitting Ctrl + C in the Arma 3 Server console.

Firewall Rules (UFW)

If UFW is enabled, you may have to add a few new rules. This can easily be done with the following commands:

sudo ufw allow from 81.0.236.111 to any port 2344 proto tcp
sudo ufw allow from 81.0.236.111 to any port 2344 proto udp
sudo ufw allow from 81.0.236.111 to any port 2345 proto tcp
sudo ufw allow proto udp to any port 2302:2305