factorioClusterio

Discord for development/support/play: https://discord.gg/5XuDkje

Important notice

This is the development branch for factorioClusterio 2.0 which is currently undergoing heavy restructuring and refactoring. Expect plugins and existing installations to frequently break when using this branch. If you don't want to be an alpha tester for 2.0 please use the stable 1.2.x branch or latest stable release.

Installation instructions below are for the unstable master branch. Go to the page for the 1.2.x branch for instructions on how to install the stable version.

Ways to support me/the project:

Contribute with code/documentation. See Contributing for how to make pull requests. Always nice to move the project forward.
Support me monetarily on patreon or paypal: danielv@live.no

Introduction & methodology
Ubuntu setup
Windows setup
Running Clusterio
Optional plugins
Common problems

Introduction

Features:

Entities to send/recieve items
Cross dimensional storage
Sending of liquids
Sending of circuit network signals
Inventory combinator to display item levels in the cluster (and epoch time)
Reporting of graphs and UPS on master interface (Also has extensive Prometheus reporting)

Optional extras (see Plugins)

Have your inventory synchronize across servers
Teleport trans from the border of one world to te next
Show in-game chat in discord

Connection diagram:

There can be any number of clients connected to each slave, and any number of slaves connected to a master but there can only be one master server in each cluster.

How does it work?

Traditional factorio mods have always been limited by the games deterministic design. This gives us a very bug free and predictable game, but doesn't allow us cool stuff such as internet communication. Clusterio exploits one of the games logging features, game.write_file and RCON to communicate between servers. Sending an item from one server to another takes this path:

server1: Chest has stuff in it, write the contents to a file and delete them from the game world
client.js on server1: File has stuff in it, parse and send to the master for storage
master: server1 gave us stuff, store it in the storage and write some statistics
server2: get-chest is empty, write a request to file
client.js on server2: Request file has stuff in it, parse and send a request to master for more items of that type
master: server2 asked for stuff, check if we have enough and how much demand there is, then send however much is appropriate back
client.js on server2: We were allowed to import x of item y, run command /c remote.call("clusterio", "importMany", "{'copper-plate':120}")

This process works the same for both items and liquids, independent on what mods are used. Yes, modded items are fully supported.

Clusterio can also do a few other neat things, such as giving you access to epoch time, syncing player inventories between servers, keeping track of playtime (playerManager plugin), teleporting trains between servers (trainTeleports) and exporting tons of factorio related statistics to Prometheus for graphing in grafana.

Ubuntu setup

Warning: These instructions are for the unstable master version and is not recommended for use, see the 1.2.x branch for how to install the stable version.

Clusterio runs on Node.js v12 and up, v11.13.0+ and v10.16.0+. Node.js itself is not supported on EOL Ubuntu releases so make sure you're on a recent release of Ubuntu.

Master and all slaves:

wget -qO - https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_12.x | sudo -E bash -
sudo apt install -y nodejs python-dev git build-essential
git clone -b master https://github.com/clusterio/factorioClusterio.git
cd factorioClusterio
wget -O factorio.tar.gz https://www.factorio.com/get-download/latest/headless/linux64
tar -xf factorio.tar.gz
npm install --only=production

downloads and installs nodejs, git and clusterio. To specify a version, change "latest" in the link to a version number like 0.14.21.

Ubuntu with Docker

The Docker support for Clusterio is curently broken. If you need it open an issue about it.

Windows setup

Warning: These instructions are for the unstable master version and is not recommended for use, see the 1.2.x branch for how to install the stable version.

Clusterio is built up of multiple parts. Here is a quick guide:

Master = master.js

Server host (Slave) = slave.js + factorio server

Game Client = The people connecting to the server

Requirements

download and install nodeJS 12 from http://nodejs.org. Clusterio runs on Node.js v12 and up, v11.13.0+ and v10.16.0+.

download and install git from https://git-scm.com/

reboot when you are done, then proceed to the next steps. reboots matter

Master

Open PowerShell or Command prompt in the directory you want to install to and run the following commands.

 git clone -b master https://github.com/clusterio/factorioClusterio
 cd factorioClusterio
 npm install --only=production

Obtain Factorio by either of these two methods:
- Via the stand alone version on from their website
  1. Create a new folder named "factorio" in the the factorioClusterio folder.
  2. Download the MS Windows (64-bit zip package) from https://www.factorio.com/download .
  3. Open the zip file and drag the folder called "Factorio_0.x.y" into the factorio folder created in step 1.
- Via steam installation
  1. Create a new folder named "factorio" in the the factorioClusterio folder.
  2. Locate the game files by right clicking the game in steam, selecting properties, then Local Files, then Browse local files.
  3. Go to the parent folder of the folder that Steam opened and copy the Factorio folder into the factorio folder created in step 1.

Running Clusterio

After following the installation instructions you can use the following commands to run Clusterio.

Setting up an admin account

Before you can manage the cluster you need to bootstrap an admin account for it. Replace <username> with your Factorio username (do not make up a new username here).

node master bootstrap create-admin <username>
node master bootstrap create-ctl-config <username>

The first command creates a user account with the given name and promotes it to a cluster admin. The second one sets up a config-control.json config for clusterctl to connect to the master server under the given user account.

Running the master Server

It's necessary to run the master server in order for anything to work. Once you've completed the setup run the following command to start it up:

node master run

Slaves

Slaves connect to the master server and are managed remotely from the master server. In order for slaves to connect to the master server they need a valid authentication token, you can create a slave config with a valid token with the following command.

node clusterctl slave create-config --name Local --generate-token

This will write a new config-slave.json file in the current directory (you can change the location with the --output option) with the name, token and url to connect to the master server with. If you are making the config for a remote slave you will need to have set the master.external_address option to the URL the master server can be reached on.

You can list the config of a slave on the slave itself with the node slave config list command. Use node slave config --help for more information.

Once the config is set up run the slave with

node slave run

Instances

Instances are created, managed and started from the master server. For now the only interface available is the clusterctl command line tool included in Clusterio. You can run this tool from any slave, or the master server without having to set up a config, if you want to manage the cluster from somewhere else you will need to set the control.master_url and control.master_token options with the node clusterctl control-config set command:

The basic operations to start a new instance is the following

node clusterctl instance create "My instance"
node clusterctl instance assign "My instance" "Local"
node clusterctl instance start "My instance"

The first line creates the instance configuration on the master server. The second assigns the instance to a slave which creates the instance directory and files needed to run the instance on the given slave. The third line starts the instance, which creates a new save if there are no save games present.

There are many more commands available with clusterctl. See node clusterctl --help for a full list of them.

Plugins

Here are the known Clusterio plugins in the wild:

Player Manager - Adds player management to the Web UI and shared inventory handling (beta)
DiscordChat - Logs in-game chat/joins/leave messages on all instances to a Discord webhook.
TrainTeleports - Allows you to teleport cargotrains between servers.

Common problems

EACCESS [...] LISTEN 443

Some systems don't let non root processes listen to ports below 1000. Either run with sudo or change config.json to use higher port numbers.

According to this link if you manually installed node.js following the above instructions, you may need to run the following command to fix this issue:

sudo setcap 'cap_net_bind_service=+ep' $(readlink -f $(which node))

Portforwarding doesn't work on the master server when running under WSL

If you follow the ubuntu guide on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux, Bash on Ubuntu on Windows specifically), you will find that the website works on localhost and on your local ip, but not on the global ip. This is also true when you correctly port-forwarded the correct ports. Even when routing this server through nginx in WSL, the issue persists. Then, on a hunch, I tried to run nginx from windows itself and found that this DID work. It came to me that the only usage difference between the 2 versions of nginx is that I got a Windows Firewall popup.

TLDR: the tested fix is:

open your windows firewall and go to advanced settings
click on inbound rules and click on new rule...
select port and click next >
select TCP and select specific local ports and type in the ports that you want to open (comma separated) and click next > 3 times
give the rule a name (like 'web server' or something), give it a description (optionally) and click finish

RMuskovets / factorioClusterio