ARK: Survival Evolved Linux Server Tools

Pre-requisites

To install ARK Server Tools you must have already installed SteamCMD following this guide:

https://developer.valvesoftware.com/wiki/SteamCMD#Linux

We assume you have created the steam user to store steamcmd and your ARK server.

Requirements

Increase max open files

Edit /etc/sysctl.conf and set:

fs.file-max=100000

Edit /etc/security/limits.conf and set these limits:

* soft nofile 100000
* hard nofile 100000

Add the following line to /etc/pam.d/common-session (Debian/Ubuntu) or /etc/pam.d/system-auth (RHEL/CentOS/Fedora):

session required pam_limits.so

After these edits, you'll need to restart your bash session or reconnect to your SSH shell to make the changes effective.

Open firewall ports

iptables -I INPUT -p udp --dport 27016 -j ACCEPT
iptables -I INPUT -p udp --dport 7778 -j ACCEPT

Install ARK Server Tools

To install ARK Server Tools run this command:

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/FezVrasta/ark-server-tools/master/netinstall.sh | sudo bash -s steam

NB: You may want to change the bash -s parameter to fit your steam user if different from steam.

This will copy the arkmanager script and its daemon to the proper directories and will create an empty log directory in /var/log for ARK Server Tools.

Configuration

Stored in /etc/arkmanager/arkmanager.cfg you can find the variables needed to start the server, like the port numbers, the system environment variables and so on.

Also, in this file, you can specify any parameter you want to add to the startup command of ARK server.
These parameters must be prefixed by the ark_ string, some example could be:

ark_SessionName="My ARK server"
ark_MaxPlayers=50
ark_ServerPVE=False
ark_DifficultyOffset=1

Your session name may contain special characters (eg. !![EU]!! Aw&some ARK) which could break the startup command.
In this case you may want to comment out the ark_SessionName variable and define it inside your GameUserSettings.ini file.

You can override or add variables for a specific system user creating a file called .arkmanager.cfg in the home directory of the system user.

Install ARK Server

To install ARK Server just run this command as normal user:

arkmanager install

Commands

To get a complete list of the script commands you can run arkmanager --help or arkmanager -h.

arkmanager install

installs arkmanager to the directory specified in .arkmanager.cfg

arkmanager start

starts ARK server

arkmanager stop

stops ARK server

arkmanager restart

restarts ARK server

arkmanager update

manually updates ARK server

arkmanager status

Get the status of the server. Show if the process is running, if the server is up and the current version number

arkmanager checkupdate

Check if a new version of the server is available but not apply it

Credits

Original author of arkmanager: LeXaT