My puck server hosting guide

Last updated: 15 July 2025

Full credit to my friend MigoMipo for the system, just doing docs. You can find Puck at https://store.steampowered.com/app/2994020/Puck/

You’ll get an extended 1 month trial, and enough credits to run 2 to 4 Puck instances for 2 months. At the end of your trial month, you will need to make a one-time, minimum 10 euro deposit with Visa/Mastercard to continue using the account after this. Full disclaimer, I am employed by UpCloud and make no money from this.

I’ll be using the 3 euro a month 1CPU/1GB developer plan here, which is good to run two 20-player Puck instances. UpCloud only charges by the hour from your credit balance - no commitment!

Before you get started, set up your SSH keys following this guide, using PuTTY if you’re on a Windows-based PC: https://upcloud.com/docs/guides/use-ssh-keys-authentication/#putty

Any problems with SSH keys and I recommend asking questions to any AI chatbot, like Mistral’s Le Chat for example https://chat.mistral.ai/chat. If you are still struggling, you can open a live chat with our support team for further assistance. You might end up chatting to me :) Your private key file is your password - keep it safe.

I will indicate terminal commands to execute with code blocks. Please read the guide fully and carefully - I recommend to copy and paste commands where applicable.

Deploy your Linux server

Go to https://hub.upcloud.com/deploy
Choose your location. This should be geographically close to your playerbase
Select the €3.00 per month Developer plan
Select Debian GNU/Linux 12 (Bookworm) as your operating system
Disable IPv6 and Utility networks (unless you want them for some reason)
Select the checkbox for your Public SSH key
Choose your hostname and server name
Deploy!

Connect to the server

Using PuTTY or your preferred SSH client, connect to the public IP address of the server as the root user. The IP should be visible under https://hub.upcloud.com/server. Check this guide for help https://upcloud.com/docs/guides/connecting-to-your-server/#putty

Copy and run the script from my GitHub repository

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pogsee/puckserver-utils/main/puckserverinit.sh -o puckserverinit.sh
chmod +x puckserverinit.sh
./puckserverinit.sh

When prompted after a few minutes, provide input for the script

Names of each server
Admin steamID64 (you can add more admins later)
Password (leave empty for none)

Start your servers

You can now start each (or only 1 if you want) server with systemctl start puck@server1 and systemctl start puck@server2. They should appear in the Puck server list now in-game!

Advanced configuration

Fancy yourself a computer whizz? Here’s some further information on how to re-configure the servers and how things work.

All of your relevant files are under /srv/puck. You can always go there with cd /srv/puck and view the files with ls

There’s 3 files you need to worry about - server1.json, server2.json, and banned_steam_ids.json

banned_steam_ids.json will record any banned players. On start/restart, both servers will re-read this file.

server1.json and server2.json are the files that define all the settings for your server.

Before making any changes here I recommend backing up your server configs with cp server1.json server1.json.backup as an example.

You can edit the server .json files with any text edit of your choice, I tend to use nano, so nano server1.json

If you mess up the configuration, the servers will refuse to appear when started and use 100% CPU - use btop to check. The formatting, commas, brackets, and quotation marks are vital. Remember the server will not take on new configuration from the file until stopped/started or restarted.

Overview of important fields

port/pingPort: these are the network ports the server uses to communicate, 7777 and 7778 by default
name: The name of the server. You can even set colours and formatting - <b>name<b> for bold and <color=cyan>name</color> for colours
maxPlayers: The maximum number of players that can join the server at once. Recommended to keep to 10 for public servers
voip: Enables or disables voice chat functionality
password: Optionally sets a password players will need to enter to join the server
isPublic: Enables or disables whether the server appears in the Puck server list
adminSteamIds: Those with their steamID64’s here can run admin commands, like /pause, /resume, /kick, /ban etc. The format should be ["12361198866157321", "12361198047409321"],

All other fields I recommend to keep where they are, change at your own risk.

Extra credit

You can do this by editing the crontab and setting a job to do this at a specified time.

nano /etc/crontab
Paste a new line (this will do 5AM UTC, change this as desired https://crontab.guru/#0_5___*) 0 5 * * * root systemctl restart puck@server1 && systemctl restart puck@server2
Ctrl+O to save, Ctrl+X to exit

It’s a great idea to enable the UpCloud firewall to block any ports you don’t need, for security and stability.

Navigate to https://hub.upcloud.com/server/, select your server, and go to the Firewall tab
Using the Add rule button, add the following rules
Protocol = TCP, Target port Single port = 22. This allow you to maintain SSH access
Protocol = UDP, Source port Single port = 123. This is to allow NTP to sync with time servers
Protocol = TCP, Target port Port range = 7777-7780. Puckserver ports
Protocol = UDP, Target port Port range = 7777-7780. Puckserver ports
Protocol = ICMP. Allows pings
Enable the checkbox at the bottom to “Auto-add these DNS rules”
Save changes
Enable the toggle the firewall

The 3 euro plan cannot handle more than two Puck instances, but if you had a larger plan and wanted to try adding more, just copy your config to server3.json, change ports and name, and start puck@server3, and so on!

If you’re looking for high quality hosting, I have a promo code available for my host - sign up with promo code puck25 https://signup.upcloud.com/?promo=puck25