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Steam is an online gaming platform used with games such as Half-Life 2, Counter-Strike: Source, Left 4 Dead, and Portal.

This guide will attempt to instruct you on how to install a Steam game SERVER - that is, you cannot play the game from the computer, but only run a dedicated online server - for these games on Ubuntu. This page has been adapted from the Valve developer community wiki SteamCMD page and this Steam community guide. This page has been updated because most Steam games have now been migrated from HLDSUpdateTool to SteamCMD.

Setting up user accounts

The server should run as its own user. Start by adding a user:

sudo adduser l4d1

In this case, I'm adding a user for Left 4 Dead (l4d), with an ID of '1', in case I need to add more later, I keep chronology this way. Ideas for Counter-Strike: Source names could be css1 and css2, hl2dm1 and hl2dm2 for Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, etc. It doesn't matter, as long as you remember it.

Change to the user's home directory and sudo to that user (the -i is for initiate, so you don't have to type sudo in front of all your commands).

cd /home/l4d1
sudo -u l4d1 -i

Now create a directory for the game server installation and a directory called steamcmd and change to steamcmd.

mkdir l4dserver
mkdir steamcmd
cd steamcmd

Getting the software

The software can be downloaded from the Steam website with the following command.

wget http://media.steampowered.com/installer/steamcmd_linux.tar.gz

You will need to unpack/decompress the downloaded archive.

tar -zxvf steamcmd_linux.tar.gz

This sets up the server software, allows you to download the gameservers, etc. Run steamCMD.

./steamcmd.sh

You may be asked to agree to Valve's Terms and Conditions. Simply type yes and hit enter.

Next up, log in anonymously, set the game server installation directory, and download the game server with validation.

login anonymous
force_install_dir /home/l4d1/l4dserver/
app_update 222860 validate

(Replace the Steam application ID with the correct one for the game server you want installed; see the dedicated servers list.)

The next part will take a while, depending on your server's network connection. You will see a percentage appear on the left. Just sit back and wait. Once the process has finished, you can simply quit.

quit