For those who don’t know, playit.gg is a free/cheap service for exposing self-hosted local game servers to the wider internet.
But as someone who already has access to a cheapish VPS, I’m curious if anyone knows of any self-hostable alternatives that I could just run as a container on my VPS.
I’ve been toying with using Wireguard UDP tunneling, but it’s proving to be a little bit more difficult and complicated than I was bargaining for. So if anyone knows of anything out there that does something like this, I’d be grateful!
It looks like a VPN, just reskinned as-a-service.
If manual Wireguard is giving you trouble, try Netbird.
Use Tailscale, it’s stupid simple. it is a Wireguard wrapper anyways.
I was hoping to have servers be more public, so visible on the master server list and able to be joined by random people. (I’m a glutton for punishment I guess. lol)
I think I saw that tailscale (or netbird, the open source and selfhosted version) also can reverse proxy UDP traffic.
I’ll take a look at it later today.
I’ve spent the evening playing around with Netbird/Tailscale. Appears that UDP in Netbird requires Traefik, so I’ve switched over to that (wanted to do this anyway).
Turns out that Traefik is perfectly able to do the proxying over my “stupid” wireguard setup, so I’ll be running that for now and look more into it later.
I am hosting 2 public game servers with my setup. My VPS exposes only those ports and I have my DNS on the same provider. That tailnet only has those servers and the VPS. The actual server boxes block all traffic except through the tailnet. The hard part is the reverse proxy on the VPS if you have never done it before.
i usually connect two machines with tailscale and use ssh forwarding
use autossh if you want auto reconnect after ssh disconnects with broken pipe
Aside from Wireguard, you have Wireguard alternatives-but-not-really-since-they-are-based-on-Wireguard like Netbird and Tailscale. The latter is more well-known, but the main downside is that, to connect to the cloud servers, you need a Google, Microsoft, or Github account to login. It can be self-hosted with Headscale (community project) though (and you don’t need an account for that, since it’s your hardware)! Netbird is similar to Tailscale, but you can use normal email login to use their cloud servers, and they offer official self-hosting support.
You could use frp to proxy specific ports to your vps. https://github.com/fatedier/frp
Netbird self-host. Install it on the VPS, add the server as a client, network the appropriate ports using their services, expose the required port via TCP or UDP in the docker deployment and reverse proxy.
You probably don’t want to do this. People will get salty and DDOS your server. I ran a KF2 server for like 5 years and eventually the traffic overwhelmed my connection and I had to stop.
