Getting Started? Click Here! How to setup a Valheim Docker server!

[mbround18]

How to setup a Valheim Docker server

Prerequisites

• A Linux based server with minimum 2GB of RAM and 10+GB of hard drive space.
• Docker installed (Debian-based)
• Docker Compose installed
• Some knowledge of shell
• SSH Access to your server

Steps

1. SSH into the server as a non-root user or su into non-root user. (How to create a linux user)
2. Make sure they have access to docker usermod -aG docker ${USER}
3. Create a new directory mkdir -p ./valheim
4. Create a new file called docker-compose.yml. See Below.
5. Copy the contents below from the docker-compose.yml into your favorite text editor.
6. Make changes to the docker-compose as necessary.
7. Run the command docker-compose up --detach

docker-compose.yml

You connection port will be +1 of what you supply in the port field. For example, the port the file below is setting up uses port 2456 which means the port you will connect to is 2457.

Run the command id -u, if your user ID does not equal 1000 you will need to add an environment variable called PUID and PGID which match your current user.

version: "3"
services:
  valheim:
    image: mbround18/valheim:latest
    ports:
      - 2456:2456/udp
      - 2457:2457/udp
      - 2458:2458/udp
    environment:
      - PORT=2456
      - NAME="Created With Valheim Docker"
      - WORLD="Dedicated"
      - PASSWORD="Banana Phone"
      - TZ=America/Chicago
      - PUBLIC=1
      - AUTO_UPDATE=0
    volumes:
    - ./valheim/saves:/home/steam/.config/unity3d/IronGate/Valheim
    - ./valheim/server:/home/steam/valheim

Having issues? STOP! DO NOT CREATE A NEW THREAD ON THIS DOCUSSION. Please submit a new discussion in Q&A or Help!.

New threads on this discussion where you need help are hard to track and it makes it difficult for others who are running into the same issue to find a solution.

1. Click here to start a new discussion
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3. Give it a meaningful title that summarizes your issue in less than 25 words.
4. For the body of the discussion question, give as much details as possible or use the templates below:

Help!

Help discussions are for if your server will not start no matter what you do. Common issues for this are:

Make sure to click the check mark on the thread that answered your question so that others can easily find the solution

---

• Wrong PUID or GUID,
  • Are you running as root? If so you should NOT be! Create a new user or log into a non-root user to run the docker-compose. (NOTE: They must be in the docker group on linux.)
  • Check your user and group id by running echo "$(id -u):$(id -g)". If this does not return 1000:1000, then you need to change PUID and GUID variables to match.
• New features aren't working! If you are just running the container, try running docker-compose pull and restarting the docker-compose.
• Container will not start properly! Check the logs, if you see network issues from steam or any other service than you might need to run docker-compose down and then run docker-compose up. Sometimes the way you have docker and docker-compose configured causes weird network states.
• Write issues! My container says it has permissions issues writing to specific directories or files! You might have spun the docker-compose up as the wrong user which would cause the volume mounts to be wrong. A simple fix for this is, log into the user you run docker-compose through, then create the directories on your host where you are mounting all the Valheim folders to. Then docker-compose down && docker-compose up

Help Discussion Template

## System Information

Operating System: [What OS you are running this on]
Docker Version: [What docker version, can be found with `docker --version`]
Docker Compose Version: [What docker-compose version you are running, can be found with `docker-compose --version`]
User & Group On Host: `echo "$(id -u):$(id -g)". If`
Are you running with BepInEx? Yes | No

## Issue Description

1. Write up what is the issue you are experiencing. 
2. Provide screenshots as needed. 
3. Always include a log from the server.

Q&A

This is used for general discussion and if you have curious questions about anything going on inside the container; this is a good area to ask that question.

Make sure to click the check mark on the thread that answered your question so that others can easily find the solution

Q&ADiscussion Template

## Question

Free range to ask pretty much anything <3 

[ragingdave]

"Make content included"? Can you elaborate on what that means?

[ghost]

"Make content included"? Can you elaborate on what that means?

nano docker-compose.yml

then copy below and paste

version: "3"
services:
  valheim:
    image: mbround18/valheim:latest
    environment:
      - PORT=2456
      - NAME="Created With Valheim Docker"
      - PASSWORD="Banana Phone"
      - TZ=America/Chicago
    ports:
      - "2456:2456/udp"
      - "2457:2457/udp"
      - "2458:2458/udp"
    volumes:
    - ./saves:/home/steam/.config/unity3d/IronGate/Valheim
    - ./server:/home/steam/valheim

then save

[AtroposOrbis]

Odin is failing to write....

CONTENTS OF DOCKER-COMPOSE
version: "3"
services:
valheim:
image: mbround18/valheim:latest
ports:
- 2460:2462/udp
environment:
TZ: "America/New_York"
NAME: "New Abyssia"
WORLD: "New Abyssia"
PORT: "2460"
PUBLIC: "1"
PASSWORD: "REDACTED"
AUTO_UPDATE: "1"
PUID: "1000"
PGID: "1000"
volumes:
- ./valheim/saves:/home/steam/.config/unity3d/IronGate/Valheim
- ./valheim/server:/home/steam/valheim

[mbround18]

@AtroposOrbis This looks like your user id and group id do not match the dockers user & group id. Are you on windows? or linux?

If on linux when you run id -u the number it spits out should be the number you supply as an environment variable called PUID

[mbround18]

"Make content included"? Can you elaborate on what that means?

Hey I have updated it to be more descriptive <3

[AtroposOrbis]

@AtroposOrbis This looks like your user id and group id do not match the dockers user & group id. Are you on windows? or linux?

If on linux when you run id -u the number it spits out should be the number you supply as an environment variable called PUID

When I updated the compose file and attempted another run, the same error occurred...

[pasisavolainen]

It would be convenient to have restart: always (on the image level) included in the yml

[AtroposOrbis]

That would be excellent indeed. +1

[magenbrot]

I have restart: unless-stopped in all my docker-compose services

[carrascodev]

@mbround18 what is the difference to use Odin over docker-compose. Would it use the same container / volumes, if I already have world within docker-compose? I am asking this because I am very confuse on how to use Odin haha

[CosmicHorrorDev]

Odin is used internally by the docker container. There's no need to interact with it directly if that's what you're asking.

[mbround18]

As @LovecraftianHorror said, Odin is purely there for internal use. If you need it, you can use it to stop/start/update your server manually but there are many provided ways to handle that. Including simply starting, stopping, and restarting the container itself.

[TheDakk]

Apologies, new the whole docker/automation arena. When you make updates to the docker image and we do a pull, does it wipe or reset the contents of Valheim server inside? Or is it all separated?

Also, does the Auto Update feature cleanly shutdown the server? I know there’s a world wipe bug out there. Automated backups?

Thanks!

[mbround18]

It is all separate :) the content you are saving, provided you followed the guide, saves only the data you are using. When you pull a new version of the image it includes a swath of features as you can see from the readme content. Each PR we do gets tested thoroughly in automated tests and manually by myself with my staging servers.

Each pull should be backwards compatible with the prior release and each added feature needs to be in an acceptable state before it gets merged in.

For the auto update function, you should be good to go <3 as for automated backups, thats a feature I wont bake into the docker container as its best practices to handle that on your own and keep the docker container light.

[mbround18]

The only thing to watch out for, is if you see a patch pull request come up from me which means something did not go right in the latest push when it got pushed up to docker hub. Although, when this happens I am right on top of it as I never deploy to production and go away from my desk even if its super early morning. (ex rn :P being 12 am with my latest changes failing in CI. Should have that fixed in a moment.)

I try to make sure this image is clean, always working, and resilient to failure <3

[TheDakk]

Thanks for this information, much appreciated. How would you suggested we back just the world DB file then? There’s another image out there that has something implemented:

https://github.com/lloesche/valheim-server-docker 

[mbround18]

Thanks for this information, much appreciated. How would you suggested we back just the world DB file then? There’s another image out there that has something implemented:

https://github.com/lloesche/valheim-server-docker

Backup discussion is over at #96 <3 and I am implementing the feature atm

[JeffMings]

This Docker image really makes it easy to run a Valheim dedicated server. The docs are good, but I would like to suggest a more detailed list. Here's what I did (This is from my notes and recollection, there may be errors) :

• Prepped a host/"containing" server. I used Ubuntu 20.04.2 and installed all of the updates.
  I installed Docker and then docker-compose. Straight from Ubuntu repos.
• Setup SSH into the Ubuntu box
• As root, created a user as a member of the Docker group. Something like:
  useradd -g docker -c "Docker Guy" -s /bin/bash -m dockerguy and set a pass- passwd dockerguy
• Became the new user- su - dockerguy
• Created the folder for the Docker container to interact with- mkdir ./valheim
• Got uid for user:

id -u     >  1010

• Created the Yaml file for docker-compose to create/update the container:

nano -w docker-compose.yml  #  with contents to reflect uid of dockerguy:

version: "3"
services:
  valheim:
    image: mbround18/valheim:latest
    ports:
      - 2456:2456/udp
      - 2457:2457/udp
      - 2458:2458/udp
    environment:
      - PORT=2456
      - NAME="ValenHeimsDay"
      - WORLD="ValenHeimsDay"
      - PASSWORD="1234567890"
      - TZ=Pacific/Honolulu
      - PUBLIC=1
      - AUTO_UPDATE=0
      - PUID=1010
      - PGID=1010
    volumes:
    - ./valheim/saves:/home/steam/.config/unity3d/IronGate/Valheim
    - ./valheim/server:/home/steam/valheim

• Started container as dockerguy WITHOUT detach command to watch the image output:

docker-compose up  

(worked, saw the server connect message)

• Started with detach param docker-compose up --detach and then checked to see if it I could see it running on my internal lan:

nmap -sU -p 2455-2459  10.0.0.123

(returns something like)

PORT	STATE	SERVICE
2455/udp	filtered	unknown
2456/udp	closed	unknown
2457/udp	open|filtered	rapido-ip
2458/udp	closed	unknown
2459/udp	filtered	unknown

• Used docker stats command to check resource utilization and get container "handle":

CONTAINER ID	NAME	CPU %	MEM USAGE / LIMIT	MEM %	NET I/O	BLOCK I/O	PIDS
11302844c3b3	dockerguy_valheim_1	113.79%	1.587GiB / 7.455GiB	21.29%	1.15GB / 665MB	156kB / 3.55MB	38

• Connected to container with command docker container exec -it dockerguy_valheim_1 /bin/bash
• Checked environment variables to make sure all was there with env command - all looks good.
• Set up port forwarding of UDP packets to ports 2456-2458 to host server.
• Checked from one of my external servers with nmap to see if it port forwarding was working. Still got:

2457/udp open|filtered rapido-ip   from outside IP - working.

• Ran Valheim - name didn't show up in server list, so I used Steam's View > Server to add my external IP as a favorite and connect to it.

Works! Wasted many hours with friend :D

[mbround18]

@JeffMings formatted your comment <3 thanks for the write up <3

[joryirving]

Does this mean that if I want to run it on port 2456, I need to set the port to 2455 in the docker compose? nmap shows the proper rapido-ip internal to my network, but I'm struggling to have someone connect to my instance.

[mbround18]

Does this mean that if I want to run it on port 2456, I need to set the port to 2455 in the docker compose? nmap shows the proper rapido-ip internal to my network, but I'm struggling to have someone connect to my instance.

No, if you set the port to 2456 in the environment variable then if you connect via the favorites listhttps://github.com//discussions/51 you will connect to 2457. However, if you use the in game function of join by IP you will use 2456.

[Napitok1987]

Hello!
Please, help me. After executing on my local machine:
nmap -sU -p 2455-2459 mydedicatedserveipaddress
I've got:

2455/udp open|filtered wago-io-system
2456/udp closed        altav-remmgt
2457/udp closed        rapido-ip
2458/udp closed        griffin
2459/udp open|filtered community

It looks like something went wrong and 2457/udp closed rapido-ip should be open, but it's closed. Am I right? And what should I do in this case?

[ghost]

I'm stucked here https://i.imgur.com/fZqjqo9.png

1 GB Memory / 25 GB Disk / SGP1 - Docker 19.03.12 on Ubuntu 20.04

But my 4 GB Memory / 80 GB Disk / SGP1 - Docker 19.03.12 on Ubuntu 20.04 Worked fine.

[CosmicHorrorDev]

1GB will be too little to run the server. Mine is using a bit over 2GB currently

[JeffMings]

If you want to stop the output of the docker container, hit Ctrl-C. Then restart it with the --detach parameter.

[TheDakk]

Should be running "docker-compose up --detach" every time reboot the server? If so, anyway to auto start when the Linux server reboots? I assume Odin is used once you detach to interact with the Valheim server? Apologies again for the n00b questions :)

[mbround18]

You are spot on with Odin, it handles all interactions with the valheim server inside the container and you dont need to interact with it :)

As for the docker-compose, you can add

restart: always

under the valheim service which should restart the server once your system reboots.

[pbek]

For me even 2GB were too little... And I never got an error message, which made debugging a lot harder...

[CosmicHorrorDev]

Allocating too little RAM seems to be a very common problem. Do you think its worth adding a changing "A Linux based server" to "A Linux based server with at least 2GB of spare RAM" or something along those lines?

It might also be worth setting up a common troubleshooting discussion as well so that people can check there if they are having problems.

[mbround18]

I added a memcheck to the containers entrypoint
#121

[pbek]

For me even 2GB were too little... And I never got an error message, which made debugging a lot harder...
I just never got a Game server connected. After moving to a server with more RAM everything worked fine.

[kevintrankt]

Working great on my end (Ubuntu 18.04 GCP) - thank you for this!

[ScottKane]

I think I have gotten it working, I just deleted the image and reran the compose and it seems to have worked

[ScottKane]

But yeah I should run some updates, it's just an old dev box

[CosmicHorrorDev]

I wasn't able to reproduce with essentially the same config. It looks like its failing around the time where it's downloading the server. Is /opt/valheim full or is anything downloaded there? It should be roughly 1GB

[TheDakk]

Wondering if he was running into this issue with the older OS:

ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#6692

[mbround18]

@ScottKane if this is still an issue, can you move this to a new discussion please?

[PiotrZadka]

Server doesn't start or appear on the list

[mbround18]

This needs to go under a new discussion. Please create a new discussion not a new thread.

[mbround18]

Please follow directions and open a help! discussion <3

[lafrad]

I'm curious to know if this would support multiple dedicated servers, so we could host worlds for different groups of friends or adventures... Is there anything here that would stop that?

[CosmicHorrorDev]

You can manage this by running multiple containers from this image and using different mounts and ports for the different servers.

[lafrad]

I'd imagine tweaking the compose to have a "valheim-1" and "valheim-2" with different critical info would do the trick....

[lafrad]

Looks like docker is fine with it, but the Valheim server is not..... the quest continues,,,,

[CosmicHorrorDev]

As long as the ports are different (say start one at the normal 2456 and the other at 3456) and the mount points are different you should be able to directly connect to either one. I've run two servers simultaneously when testing and didn't have any issues

[kpenfound]

Thanks for all the hard work!

I've been using this project with my terraform module to run my Valheim server on AWS since the beginning! Introspection into the server with Odin is really cool

[mbround18]

Hey @kpenfound amazing work!!

[mikart143]

Hi!
Great work!
I am having small trouble with running this on Oracle Ampere Free server.
When I start server all I receive is :

ln: failed to create symbolic link '/home/steam/.steam/root': No such file or directory
ln: failed to create symbolic link '/home/steam/.steam/steam': No such file or directory

My docker-compose.yaml

version: "3"
services:
  valheim:
    privileged: true
    image: mbround18/valheim:latest
    platform: linux/amd64

    stop_signal: SIGINT
    ports:
      - "2456:2456/udp"
      - "2457:2457/udp"
      - "2458:2458/udp"
    environment:
      PORT: 2456
      NAME: "XXXXX"
      WORLD: "Dedicated"
      PASSWORD: "XXXXX"
      TZ: "Europe/Warsaw"
      PUBLIC: 0
      ENABLE_CROSSPLAY: 1
      AUTO_UPDATE: 1
      AUTO_UPDATE_SCHEDULE: "0 1 * * *"
      AUTO_BACKUP: 1
      AUTO_BACKUP_SCHEDULE: "*/15 * * * *"
      AUTO_BACKUP_REMOVE_OLD: 1
      AUTO_BACKUP_DAYS_TO_LIVE: 3
      AUTO_BACKUP_ON_UPDATE: 1
      AUTO_BACKUP_ON_SHUTDOWN: 1
      UPDATE_ON_STARTUP: 1
    volumes:
      - ./valheim/saves:/home/steam/.config/unity3d/IronGate/Valheim
      - ./valheim/server:/home/steam/valheim
      - ./valheim/backups:/home/steam/backups

Full log:

[Valheim][root] : Navigating to steam home...
[Valheim][root] : Launching as steam...
[Valheim][steam]: ###########################################################################
[Valheim][steam]: Valheim Server - Sun Apr  2 07:38:00 PM Europe 2023
[Valheim][steam]: STEAM_UID 1000 - STEAM_GUID 1000
[Valheim][steam]: Installing Valheim via odin 1.5.3...
[Valheim][steam]: ###########################################################################
[Valheim][steam]: Variables loaded.....
[Valheim][steam]: Port: 2456
[Valheim][steam]: Name: Pierdolnik na ARM
[Valheim][steam]: World: Dedicated
[Valheim][steam]: Public: 0
[Valheim][steam]: With Crossplay: 1
[Valheim][steam]: Password: (REDACTED)
[Valheim][steam]: Running Install...
[ODIN][INFO]  - Installing 896660 to /home/steam/valheim
[ODIN][INFO]  - steamcmd found in path
ln: failed to create symbolic link '/home/steam/.steam/root': No such file or directory
ln: failed to create symbolic link '/home/steam/.steam/steam': No such file or directory
[ODIN][ERROR] - Exited with http code: 1

[mbround18]

Can you create a new thread under the help section?

[mikart143]

@mbround18 Done: #689