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 usually connect two machines with tailscale and use ssh forwarding
use autossh if you want auto reconnect after ssh disconnects with broken pipe
You could look at pangolin as well. There’s a number of guides on YouTube. Essentially a wire guard tunnel to your VPS.
Why do you need a VPN if you’re just trying to expose game servers to the public?
The game server is probably behind a NAT. I’m standing in the same situation.
Got a small VPS with a TCP VPN to access all my devices despite location, and a comparably powerfull server behind a NAT which I would like to host UDP services on.
It needs to be said that we are talking actual VPNs here, and not “VPN-as-proxy” to spoof your location etc.
Are you unable to port forward?
Can’t port forward through the CGNAT of my ISP, only my own router’s NAT.
That is, unless I buy a unique IPv4 from my ISP.
Gotcha by the balls, VPN would have the same problem unless you can host the VPN server on IPv6?
Have the ISP place their gateway/router into bridge mode. This will pass the public WAN IP directly to your router, allowing it to handle NAT, firewall policies, and port forwarding without double NAT.
I’ve been hosting public-facing servers for several years and regularly run dedicated servers for my son. I keep the ISP gateway in the setup because they provide a substantial discount for using their modem/router rather than connecting the UDM Pro directly to the fiber ONT.
Yeah, that sort of thing.
I should say that I’m finally having some luck with using wireguard, so I’m making progress. Got a few rounds of Counter-Strike in with a friend about an hour ago!
Would that be CS 1.6? Can you get your game server to appear in the public list when you do it this way?
Yeah, CS 1.6!
I’m not sure about the master server list just yet, sorry.
Pangolin would work, it’s still wireguard underneath but with a webUI to set up things and simplify it. It’s fairly easy to install on your server with their docker compose examples.
I think Pangolin would be massively overkill for this. It’s designed to be a CDN layer orchestrator and it’s primarily a HTTP reverse proxy. You can do it with Pangolin but it complicates things and you’d need more resources too.
All you really need on the VPS is to run a tunnel (WG or OpenVPN) and forward whatever ports the games need from the VPS public IP into the tunnel. Maybe a DDNS tool/script if the public IP is dynamic.
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.
