README

Run your game servers from the forum your players already live in.

Garrison puts your Minecraft, Valheim, ARK, Rust, Terraria or Factorio server on your Flarum forum — its status, its console, and the people playing on it right now. Any server you can install, with or without Docker — and for seven popular games it can do the installing, from a list, without you looking up a Steam app id.

This package is free and MIT licensed, and it covers one host and one server: start, stop and restart, the console, the server pages, the widget, and the alerting that tells you when a server has quietly stopped accepting players. It is a whole product, not a trial, and it does not expire. Garrison Pro adds backups, off-site copies, scheduled work, config editing, in-game identity, and no limit on hosts or servers.

Why it exists

A server that is running and a server that players can join are different facts. Garrison was written after a Valheim server spent twenty hours up, advertised, and unjoinable, with every dashboard in the world showing it green.

So Garrison checks readiness separately from state, and when something breaks it climbs a ladder rather than thrashing: wait, restart, and — if restarting is clearly not working — stop, say so, and leave it alone for a person. You are told at every step, by forum notification, email and Discord.

What you get

A page for every server

Its state, its players, how to join it, what it is doing to the machine, its console, its backups and its settings — at a URL you can link to. Every alert links straight here, because "Shattered Pact stopped accepting players" followed by a list of eleven servers is a search task at the worst possible moment.

/garrison and /garrison/s/:id are ordinary Flarum routes that Garrison registers itself. They use your theme, your permissions and your login, and they work on a forum with nothing else installed — there is no page builder, no CMS and no template to assemble first.

Backups you can actually restore from

Create, list, restore and delete. A safety copy is taken automatically before every restore, so the most dangerous button in the product is reversible. Restoring into a running server is refused — writing a world file under a live process corrupts it hours before anyone notices — so Garrison stops the server for you, restores, and leaves it stopped until you have checked.

Copies somewhere else

To any S3-compatible provider — AWS S3, Backblaze B2, Cloudflare R2, Wasabi, MinIO. Because the disaster your local backups do not cover is the one where they were on the disk that died.

The bucket keys live on your game host and never reach the forum. The panel tells you whether copies are landing, and shows the provider's own words when they are not.

The console

Live output, and a line you can type back. Retained, so the person who arrives after something went wrong can still read what happened.

Who is playing — and who they are on your forum

Garrison reads joins and leaves from the game's own log (presets for Minecraft, Valheim, ARK, Rust, Terraria and Factorio) so you can see who is on right now. A player can then prove an in-game character is theirs: Garrison whispers them a code in the game, they type it on the forum, and their playtime appears on their profile and on the server's leaderboard.

A leaderboard of in-game names is something any panel can show. One where the names are people you can reply to is what only a panel living inside a community can do.

Scheduled work

Nightly restarts, backups, and messages to players — with advance warnings, which are the difference between a restart and an outage. Day toggles and a clock, not a cron field.

Settings, without a file manager

Edit server.properties and friends from the forum — the files you choose, and optionally only the keys you choose, so a moderator can change the message of the day without being three lines from the RCON password. Comments in the file become the help text. Editing rewrites one line in place, so your annotated config stays annotated.

A widget too, wherever you keep widgets

Separately from the pages above — which need nothing — Garrison offers a compact server-status widget to Flarum's own sidebar, fof/forum-widgets-core, Bespoke and Page Builder. The stock sidebar is built in and needs no extra extension; the other three are picked up only if you already run them.

Details, and the one gotcha worth knowing about Page Builder, are in docs/widgets.md.

How it is built

An agent — one small Go binary — runs on your game host and dials out to the forum. No inbound port, no port forward, no static IP. The box under your desk works.

It speaks a closed set of verbs and nothing else. A forum that is completely compromised can restart a server you already configured; it cannot ask for a shell, because there is no verb through which it could. Every path, command and credential lives on the host, in a file only you can write.

Docker is optional and always was. Most game servers in the world are a folder from SteamCMD with a start script, and those are first-class here.

And it tells you when it is not working

Garrison depends on your forum's scheduler and its queue worker, and neither announces its absence — a forum with no cron entry runs none of this and looks entirely normal. So Garrison pushes a heartbeat down the same road its alerts take, and the admin page reports whether anything is travelling it.

garrison-agent --check validates your whole configuration before anything runs — including listing your off-site bucket, because a credentials check that only looks for non-empty strings passes for a typo'd secret key — and exits non-zero so you can put it in an install script.

valheim
  ok   driver docker, stop grace 2m0s
  ok   backups: 4 path(s) under /opt/valheim/config, keeping 14
  ok   players: reading who is online, and can verify forum accounts in-game
  ok   off-site: shattered-pact-backups reachable, 31 archive(s) already there

1 server(s) configured, 0 problem(s)

Installing

composer require ernestdefoe/garrison
php flarum extension:enable ernestdefoe-garrison
php flarum migrate
php flarum cache:clear

Then pair a host and put its token in the agent's config:

php flarum garrison:pair "my game host"

Full setup — the agent, its config, player tracking and the systemd unit — is in docs/agent.md.

🚨 Garrison needs Flarum's scheduler. Without this line in your crontab it will check nothing and restart nothing, silently:

* * * * * php /path/to/forum/flarum schedule:run

Garrison tells you on its admin page if it is missing.

Garrison Pro

$99/year or $12/month. A separate package under a commercial licence, which adds to this one rather than replacing it:

Backups you can actually restore from — and a safety copy is taken automatically before every restore, so the most dangerous button in the product is reversible.
Copies somewhere else — off the game host to S3-compatible storage, because a backup on the machine that died is not a backup.
Scheduled work — nightly restarts, backups and messages to players, with advance warnings, which are the difference between a restart and an outage.
Settings without a file manager — edit server.properties and friends from the forum, the files you choose and optionally only the keys you choose.
Player identity, proved in the game — a player claims a character, Garrison whispers them a code inside the game, and their playtime appears on their profile and the server leaderboard.
Unlimited hosts and servers.

Buy it at https://ernestdefoe.online/account, then:

composer config repositories.ernestdefoe composer https://ernestdefoe.online/composer
composer config --auth http-basic.ernestdefoe.online token YOUR_TOKEN
composer require ernestdefoe/garrison-pro
php flarum extension:enable ernestdefoe-garrison-pro
php flarum cache:clear

There is no licence key anywhere in Garrison — no phone-home, no grace period, no expiry. The paid features live in the paid package, and that is the whole of the mechanism. Removing it never deletes anything: backups already taken stay on disk and stay listed, schedules pause rather than vanish, identity links stay linked, and a running server is never stopped by anything to do with licensing. See docs/entitlement.md.

Requirements

Flarum 2.0
PHP 8.3+
A game host you can run a small binary on (Linux x86-64 or arm64)
Docker optional

No other Flarum extension is required.

Licence & support

Package	Licence
`ernestdefoe/garrison` (this one)	MIT — use it, fork it, keep it
`ernestdefoe/garrison-pro`	Commercial, one licence per forum

Support is at https://ernestdefoe.online/d/100, and issues on this repository are welcome too. Bugs and feature requests both — every fix in the changelog started as somebody saying something was wrong.

ernestdefoe / garrison

Package info

Security

Statistics