Servers Quickstart

Running a SA:MP server can be a time-consuming process behind-the-scenes. Making sure the configuration and environment is correct is vital to success. The server.cfg file can get messy on larger projects and it's not a standardised format so there aren't tools to validate it.

sampctl provides a tool to "compile" a more developer-friendly JSON or YAML "Runtime Configuration" to a server.cfg file so you never have to worry about it again!

On top of that, sampctl can handle running the server for you and it will even make sure it restarts when it crashes (without getting into a crash loop). It can also download the necessary server binary files for your platform (server, npc and announce files) so you'll never have to unzip them again!

Quick Start

If you're either starting a new project or have an existing project, cd into the project directory and run:

sampctl server init

You will then be asked a series of questions about your gamemode, some information will be inferred from the existing setup.

After that, there will be a samp.json or samp.yaml file in the directory. This is your new method of configuration and every time you run the server, this file will be used to generate a server.cfg.

• This directory is now known as a "runtime"
• The samp.json/samp.yaml file is a "runtime config"

Ensure

A runtime can be "ensured" which means sampctl will make sure everything is set up correctly in order to run the server. You can either use

sampctl server ensure

to trigger the "ensure" process.

Ensuring Plugins

So, now you've got set up, your config may look like this:

{
  "gamemodes": ["cnr"],
  "plugins": ["crashdetect", "sscanf", "streamer"],
  "port": 7777,
  "hostname": "My Awesome Server",
  "maxplayers": 32,
  "rcon": false,
  "rcon_password": "test"
}

Lets say you want to keep your plugins up to date. The old way of doing this would be to watch the forum or GitHub for new releases and when there is one, download the new binaries, upload them to your VPS or place them in your local dev folder.

With sampctl, you simply just replace your entries in plugins with GitHub username/repository syntax:

{
  "gamemodes": ["cnr"],
  "plugins": [
    "Zeex/samp-plugin-crashdetect",
    "maddinat0r/sscanf",
    "samp-incognito/samp-streamer-plugin"
  ],
  "port": 7777,
  "hostname": "My Awesome Server",
  "maxplayers": 32,
  "rcon": false,
  "rcon_password": "test"
}

Now if you run sampctl server ensure, these three plugins will be automatically downloaded and installed to the plugins directory.

Don't worry about adding .so for Linux and leaving it out for Windows, sampctl handles that automatically!

Conclusion

You now know the basics of sampctl server management. There are plenty more features so explore this wiki or type --help after any sampctl command.

You can learn more about the Runtime Configuration here.