Submitted by Petey on Tue, 02/16/2010 - 11:29
Hello and welcome to this tutorial on SmartFoxServer Pro. I am Petey from BurgZerg Arcade at burgzergarcade.com and today we will install SmartFoxServer Pro on a Linux box. For our server, we will be using the 9.10 Server version of Ubuntu. It is setup to be remotely controlled from a different computer. When our project is done, we will be moving the SmartFoxServer installation over to our live server, but keep this as our test server.
For some of the tutorials that we will be performing here, I will have a need for some sort of server. Now there are a lot of different options here, and we may cover other ones in different tutorials, but today I wanted to get SmartFoxServer Pro up and running as it seems to be the easiest one to setup and allows you to do prolong testing with out a license.
SmartFoxServer Pro can be used for multiplayer games as an easy way to connect players and control what happens between them. What I really like about it though, you get to use it for up to 20 connections at the same time for free while you are creating and testing during the development of the application. Make sure that you read the license agreement before you launch anything for the public to use.
I have an spare computer set up for my local server. This will be the machine that I will be doing all of my testing on. The first thing we should do is get the SmartFoxServer Pro package from the website. Make sure that you also get the latest patch while you are there.
I have them both downloaded already, so boot up your favorite ftp client and send the SmartFoxServer Pro package to your server. One thing that I forgot to mention is that you are going to need root access to your server. If you are doing this on a machine at home, then you are ok, but if you are trying to set this up on your live site, then make sure your have root access. Most shared hosting plans do not offer root access to their customers. Generally you are going to need a Virtual Private Server (VPS) or a Dedicated Server in order to get root access, but not always. Check with your hosting provder to make sure if you have any questions.
Once you have uploaded SmartFoxServer Pro to your server.
Unzip it with:
tar –xf SFSPRO_linux64_1.6.6.tar.gz
Now lets install it:
cd SmartFoxServer_PRO_1.6.6
./install
I suggest that you install it in the place that it suggest. This will be /home/petey for me.
You should get the message that it was successfully installed. Now lets go fire it up and make sure that it installed properly.
cd /home/petey/SFS_PRO_1.6.6/Server
sudo ./sfs console
This will start SmartFoxServer Pro up in a console so you can see everything that is going on. If there are any problems starting it, then it should show you here. Now lets stop it and add that patch. Press Command C if on a Mac or Control C on Windows to exit the console. Just to make sure that SmartFoxServer Po is not running, lets enter the command:
sudo ./sfs stop
In the patch notes, it will tell you how to install the patch as well as what the patch fixes. Let go ahead and install the patch. All of the files in the Server folder will go into the directory {your-sfs-folder}/Server/lib/. It will replace some files that are there. Then Copy over the the FlashAPI files to their proper directories as well. The AS2 files go into the {your-sfs-folder}/Flash API/Actionscript 2.0 directory, and the AS3 file will go into the {your-sfs-folder}/Flash API/Actionscript 3.0 directory.
Fire up the server again just to make sure that everything is running ok.
cd /home/petey/SFS_PRO_1.6.6/Server
sudo ./sfs console
If everything is running ok, then lets stop it again.
sudo ./sfs stop
There are a lot of configuration options available to you when you are setting up your SmartFoxServer Pro instalation. It comes with the ability to run a webserver for you called Jetty, as well as a database called H2. If you are not planning to use these, then you should turn them off as they will use some resources even if not used. Currently I am using MySQL for my database, and NGINX as my webserver.
We will cover how to configure your SmartFoxServer installation in a later as there are quite a few options to consider. IF you want to run your SmartFoxServer Pro installation and play around with it until the next tutorial, you can use the command:
./sfs start
To make sure the server is running, you can use the command:
./sfs status
I hope this tutorial has helped you get the SmartFoxServer Pro installed and running properly.
Until next time.
Petey
