Management de DE

Management

Dieser Abschnitt beschäftigt sich mit dem Thema, den ASF-Prozess optimal zu verwalten. Obwohl es für die Nutzung nicht zwingend vorgeschrieben ist, enthält es eine Reihe von Tipps, Tricks und bewährten Praktiken, die wir teilen möchten, speziell für Systemadministratoren, Menschen, die ASF sowohl für den Einsatz in externen Repositories, als auch für fortgeschrittene Benutzer verpacken.

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systemd Service für Linux

In generic and linux variants, ASF comes with [email protected] file, which is a configuration file of the service for systemd. If you'd like to run ASF as a service, for example in order to launch it automatically after startup of your machine, then a proper systemd service is arguably the best way to do it, therefore we highly recommend it instead of managing it on your own through nohup, screen or alike.

Firstly, create the account for the user you want to run ASF under, assuming it doesn't exist yet. We'll use asf user for this example, if you decided to use a different one, you'll need to substitute asf user in all of our examples below with your selected one. Our service does not allow you to run ASF as root, since it's considered a bad practice.

su # Or sudo -i, to get into root shell
useradd -m asf # Create account you intend to run ASF under

Next, unpack ASF to /home/asf/ArchiSteamFarm folder. The folder structure is important for our service unit, it should be ArchiSteamFarm folder in your $HOME, so /home/<user>. If you did everything correctly, there will be /home/asf/ArchiSteamFarm/[email protected] file existing. If you're using linux variant and didn't unpack the file on Linux, but for example used file transfer from Windows, then you'll also need to chmod +x /home/asf/ArchiSteamFarm/ArchiSteamFarm.

We'll do all below actions as root, so get to its shell with su or sudo -i.

Firstly it's a good idea to ensure that our folder still belongs to our asf user, chown -hR asf:asf /home/asf/ArchiSteamFarm executed once will do it. The permissions could be wrong e.g. if you've downloaded and/or unpacked the zip file as root.

Secondly, if you're using generic variant of ASF, you need to ensure dotnet command is recognized and within one of the standard locations: /usr/local/bin, /usr/bin or /bin. This is required for our systemd service which executes dotnet /path/to/ArchiSteamFarm.dll command. Check if dotnet --info works for you, if yes, type command -v dotnet to find out where it's located. If you've used official installer, it should be in /usr/bin/dotnet or one of the two other locations, which is alright. If it's in custom location such as /usr/share/dotnet/dotnet, create a symlink for it using ln -s "$(command -v dotnet)" /usr/bin/dotnet. Now command -v dotnet should report /usr/bin/dotnet, which will also make our systemd unit work. If you're using OS-specific variant, you don't need to do anything in this regard.

Next, cd /etc/systemd/system and execute ln -s /home/asf/ArchiSteamFarm/ArchiSteamFarm\@.service ., this will create a symbolic link to our service declaration and register it in systemd. Symbolic link will allow ASF to update your systemd unit automatically as part of ASF update - depending on your situation, you may want to use that approach, or simply cp the file and manage it yourself however you'd like.

Afterwards, ensure that systemd recognizes our service:

systemctl status ArchiSteamFarm@asf

○ [email protected] - ArchiSteamFarm Service (on asf)
     Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/[email protected]; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: inactive (dead)
       Docs: https://github.com/JustArchiNET/ArchiSteamFarm/wiki

Pay special attention to the user we declare after @, it's asf in our case. Our systemd service unit expects from you to declare the user, as it influences the exact place of the binary /home/<user>/ArchiSteamFarm, as well as the actual user systemd will spawn the process as.

If systemd returned output similar to above, everything is in order, and we're almost done. Now all that is left is actually starting our service as our chosen user: systemctl start ArchiSteamFarm@asf. Wait a second or two, and you can check the status again:

systemctl status ArchiSteamFarm@asf

● [email protected] - ArchiSteamFarm Service (on asf)
     Loaded: loaded (/etc/systemd/system/[email protected]; disabled; vendor preset: enabled)
     Active: active (running) since (...)
       Docs: https://github.com/JustArchiNET/ArchiSteamFarm/wiki
   Main PID: (...)
(...)

If systemd states active (running), it means everything went well, and you can verify that ASF process should be up and running, for example with journalctl -r, as ASF by default also writes to its console output, which is recorded by systemd. If you're satisfied with the setup you have right now, you can tell systemd to automatically start your service during boot, by executing systemctl enable ArchiSteamFarm@asf command. That's all.

If by any chance you'd like to stop the process, simply execute systemctl stop ArchiSteamFarm@asf. Likewise, if you want to disable ASF from being started automatically on boot, systemctl disable ArchiSteamFarm@asf will do that for you, it's very simple.

Please note that, as there is no standard input enabled for our systemd service, you won't be able to input your details through the console in usual way. Running through systemd is equivalent to specifying Headless: true setting and comes with all its implications. Fortunately for you, it's very easy to manage your ASF through ASF-ui, which we recommend in case you need to supply additional details during login or otherwise manage your ASF process further.

Environment variables

It's possible to supply additional environment variables to our systemd service, which you'll be interested in doing in case you want to for example use a custom --cryptkey command-line argument, therefore specifying ASF_CRYPTKEY environment variable.

Um benutzerdefinierte Umgebungsvariablen bereitzustellen, muss der Ordner /etc/asf (falls er nicht existiert), mit mkdir -p /etc/asf erstellt werden. We recommend to chown -hR root:root /etc/asf && chmod 700 /etc/asf to ensure that only root user has access to read those files, because they might contain sensitive properties such as ASF_CRYPTKEY. Afterwards, write to a /etc/asf/<user> file, where <user> is the user you're running the service under (asf in our example above, so /etc/asf/asf).

The file should contain all environment variables that you'd like to provide to the process. Those that do not have a dedicated environment variable, can be declared in ASF_ARGS:

# Declare only those that you actually need
ASF_ARGS="--no-config-migrate --no-config-watch"
ASF_CRYPTKEY="my_super_important_secret_cryptkey"
ASF_NETWORK_GROUP="my_network_group"

# And any other ones you're interested in

Overriding part of the service unit

Thanks to the flexibility of systemd, it's possible to overwrite part of ASF unit while still preserving the original unit file and allowing ASF to update it for example as part of auto-updates.

In this example, we'd like to modify default ASF systemd unit behaviour from restarting only on success, to restarting also on fatal crashes. In order to do so, we'll override Restart property under [Service] from default of on-success to always. Simply execute systemctl edit ArchiSteamFarm@asf, naturally replacing asf with the target user of your service. Then add your changes as indicated by systemd in proper section:

### Editing /etc/systemd/system/[email protected]/override.conf
### Anything between here and the comment below will become the new contents of the file

[Service]
Restart=always

### Lines below this comment will be discarded

### /etc/systemd/system/[email protected]
# [Install]
# WantedBy=multi-user.target
# 
# [Service]
# EnvironmentFile=-/etc/asf/%i
# ExecStart=dotnet /home/%i/ArchiSteamFarm/ArchiSteamFarm.dll --no-restart --process-required --service --system-required
# Restart=on-success
# RestartSec=1s
# SyslogIdentifier=asf-%i
# User=%i
# (...)

And that's it, now your unit acts the same as if it had only Restart=always under [Service].

Of course, alternative is to cp the file and manage it yourself, but this allows you for flexible changes even if you decided to keep original ASF unit, for example with a symlink.

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Never run ASF as administrator!

ASF includes its own validation whether the process is being run as administrator (root) or not. Running as root is not required for any kind of operation done by the ASF process, assuming properly configured environment it's operating in, and therefore should be regarded as a bad practice. This means that on Windows, ASF should never be executed with "run as administrator" setting, and on Unix ASF should have a dedicated user account for itself, or re-use your own in case of a desktop system.

For further elaboration on why we discourage running ASF as root, refer to superuser and other resources. If you're still not convinced, ask yourself what would happen to your machine if ASF process executed rm -rf /* command right after its launch.

I run as root because ASF can't write to its files

This means that you have wrongly configured permissions of the files ASF is trying to access. You should login as root account (either with su or sudo -i) and then correct the permissions by issuing chown -hR asf:asf /path/to/ASF command, substituting asf:asf with the user that you'll run ASF under, and /path/to/ASF accordingly. If by any chance you're using custom --path telling ASF user to use the different directory, you should execute the same command again for that path as well.

After doing that, you should no longer get any kind of issue related to ASF not being able to write over its own files, as you've just changed the owner of everything ASF is interested in to the user the ASF process will actually run under.

I run as root because I don't know how to do it otherwise

su # Or sudo -i, to get into root shell
useradd -m asf # Create account you intend to run ASF under
chown -hR asf:asf /path/to/ASF # Ensure your new user has access to the ASF directory
su asf -c /path/to/ASF/ArchiSteamFarm # Or sudo -u asf /path/to/ASF/ArchiSteamFarm, to actually start the program under your user

That would be doing it manually, it's much easier to use our systemd service explained above.

I know better and I still want to run as root

As of V5.2.0.10, ASF no longer stops you from doing so, only displays a warning with a short notice. Just don't be shocked if one day due to a bug in the program it'll blow up your whole OS with complete data loss - you've been warned.

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Mehrere Instanzen

ASF unterstützt das Ausführen mehrerer Instanzen des Prozesses auf derselben Maschine. The instances can be completely standalone or derived from the same binary location (in which case, you want to run them with different --path command-line argument).

Wenn Sie mehrere Instanzen von derselben Binärdatei ausführen, ist zu beachten, dass das normalerweise automatische Updates deaktiviert werden sollte, da es keine Synchronisation zwischen diese im Bezug auf Auto-Updates gibt. Wenn Sie automatische Updates aktivieren möchten, empfehlen wir Standalone-Instanzen aber Sie können trotzdem dafür sorgen, dass Updates funktionieren, solange Sie sicherstellen können, dass alle anderen ASF-Instanzen geschlossen sind.

ASF wird sein Bestes tun, um eine minimale Menge an OS-übergreifender Kommunikation mit anderen ASF-Instanzen zu pflegen. This includes ASF checking its configuration directory against other instances, as well as sharing core process-wide limiters configured with *LimiterDelay global config properties, ensuring that running multiple ASF instances will not cause a possibility to run into a rate-limiting issue. In Bezug auf technische Aspekte verwenden alle Plattformen unseren dedizierten Mechanismus von benutzerdefinierten ASF-Dateisperren, die im temporären Verzeichnis erstellt wurden, C:\Users\<YourUser>\AppData\Local\Temp\ASF unter Windows, und /tmp/ASF unter Unix.

Es ist nicht erforderlich die gleiche *LimiterDelay Eigenschaften zu teilen um ASF Instanzen auszuführen, sie können verschiedene Werte verwenden, da jeder ASF nach dem Erwerb der Sperre seine eigene konfigurierte Verzögerung zur Release-Zeit hinzufügt. Wenn *LimiterDelay auf 0 gesetzt ist, wird die ASF-Instanz das Warten auf die Sperre der angegebenen Ressource, die mit anderen Instanzen geteilt wird, überspringen (was möglicherweise immer noch eine gemeinsame Sperre untereinander aufrecht erhalten könnte). Wenn auf einen beliebigen anderen Wert gesetzt, wird ASF sich korrekt mit anderen ASF-Instanzen synchronisieren, und wartet bis es an der Reihe ist, bevor es dann nach konfigurierter Verzögerung die Sperre aufhebt, wodurch andere Instanzen fortfahren können.

ASF berücksichtigt die WebProxy Einstellung bei der Entscheidung über den gemeinsamen Anwendungsbereich, was bedeutet, dass zwei ASF-Instanzen, die verschiedene WebProxy Konfigurationen verwenden, ihre Begrenzungen nicht untereinander teilen werden. Dies wird implementiert, um WebProxy zu ermöglichen, ohne übermäßige Verzögerungen zu arbeiten, wie von verschiedenen Netzwerkschnittstellen erwartet. This should be good enough for majority of use cases, however, if you have a specific custom setup in which you're e.g. routing requests yourself in a different way, you can specify network group yourself through --network-group command-line argument, which will allow you to declare ASF group that will be synchronized with this instance. Beachten Sie, dass ausschließlich benutzerdefinierte Netzwerkgruppen verwendet werden. Das bedeutet, dass ASF WebProxy nicht mehr zur Bestimmung der richtigen Gruppe verwenden wird, da Sie für die Gruppierung in diesem Fall verantwortlich sind.

Wenn Sie unseren systemd service wie oben beschrieben für mehrere ASF-Instanzen verwenden wollen, ist dies sehr einfach. Verwenden Sie einfach einen anderen Benutzer für unsere ArchiSteamFarm@ Service-Deklaration und folgen Sie mit den verbleibenden Schritten. This will be equivalent of running multiple ASF instances with distinct binaries, so they can also auto-update and operate independently of each other.