Cyphesis, the Worldforge server

Cyphesis is the server for the WorldForge system.

Installation

If you intend to build this as a prerequisite for the Ember client or the Cyphesis server we strongly suggest that you use the Hammer tool to compile Ember. This is script provided by the Worldforge project which will download and install all of the required libraries and components used by Worldforge.

Otherwise the library can most easily be built through the following commands.

mkdir build_`arch` && cd build_`arch`
cmake ..
make
make install

Tests

The test suite can be built and run using the check target. For example:

make check

API documentation

If Doxygen is available API documentation can be generated using the docs target. For example:

make docs

Dependencies

Cyphesis is built using CMake. It requires Python and PostgreSQL which are included with most Linux distributions, and Atlas-C++, varconf, Mercator and wfmath which are provided by the WorldForge project. GNU readline is required by some of the included tools. Boost is used as well, mainly for the ASIO library which drives networking.

If built from source the software and data must be installed using "make install" before it will be ready. Go to the Section called Setup for information on the setup steps required after installation.

Setup

The software requires some post-installation configuration before it will run correctly. If you plan to run a server using the System V init services as provided by the cyphesis rpm then most of this configuration is handled for you automatically. If this is the case please see the Section called Setup as a System Service for more information.

The first step is to setup the database access. The database is required to store account and rule information. If full server persistence is enabled, the database is also used to store the entire world state. A postgresql server must be running on the system where you plan to run cyphesis, and the user who will run cyphesis must have access to the database. If you do not have root access on the system you will need to contact the system administrator to request a database account. By default cyphesis assumes that access to a PostgreSQL RDBMS running on the same machine from a user account with the same name as the database account does not require a password. If this is not the case you can either configure the PostgreSQL RDBMS to work this way, or specify a password in the config file.

Once database access has been granted you must run cyloadrules to load the default rulesets into the database. For more information on how cyloadrules works, including advanced usage see the Section called Usage and configuration.

The server is now ready to run. For for more information on how to start the server see the Section called Usage and configuration.

Setup as a System Service

Running cyphesis as a service is the simplest way to get the server up and running. If you are using rpm packages, the cyphesis rpm handles creating a user account so that cyphesis does not run as the superuser. In order to run the server correctly, the cyphesis service must be started, followed by the cyclient service. This can be handled by configuring the system to start these services at boot time, or by running the init scripts manually as root as follows:

# /etc/init.d/cyphesis start
# /etc/init.d/cyclient start

The postgresql service is required and must be started before cyphesis. The first time the cyphesis service is run, the init script will ensure that cyphesis has access to the database, and will preload the database with the neccessary data automatically.

If you are not using the packaged version of cyphesis, but wish to run it as a system service, the init scripts are included in the top directory of the source package and are called cyphesis.init and cyclient.init. Both of these files should be installed in the init script directory on your system, usually /etc/rc.d/init.d/. The procedure for enabling system services varies from system to system. One command used for controlling services is the chkconfig command, found on most Linux systems, and some Unix variants. Once installed the scripts can be activated as follows:

# chkconfig --add cyphesis
# chkconfig --add cyclient

The services are then enabled as follows:

# chkconfig cyphesis on
# chkconfig cyclient on

For further details please see the chkconfig documentation. By default the cyphesis init scripts attempt to run the server and client as a user called cyphesis. An account with this username will need to be created before the service will work. The file called cyphesis.sysconfig can optionally be installed as /etc/sysconfig/cyphesis and edited to control the username used to run the cyphesis server and client processes.

When cyphesis has been run as a system service, any error message or other information are sent to the syslog. On most Linux systems this means that you can see these message by looking at /var/log/messages. Please see the syslog documentation for information about how to control these log messages.

Running a basic server

Before you run the server for the first time, run the cyloadrules to prepare the database tables. The command should print out some message indicating the number of rules loaded. You will not need to run this command again unless you upgrade to a newer version of the rules or of cyphesis.

Start the server with the cyphesis command. It will output some startup messages and then run in the foreground. If you want to run the server in the background, start the server with the option --cyphesis:daemon=true .

Each time the server is run it needs to be populated with game data before it does anything useful. If you are running the server using the System V init service then this is handled for you by the cyclient service. If you are running the server manually you will need to run cyclient yourself. In a separate terminal run the cyclient command, which will populate the server, outputting messages as it does this. Once it has completed cyclient will exit, and the server will be ready. The server will automatically register its presence with the metaserver so you will not need to advertise it.

If you everything has worked so far, and you are not planning to do any server or world development at this time then you do not need to read any of the rest of these instructions.

Usage and configuration

The main server binary is called cyphesis. Its command line arguments and configuration are managed by varconf, which means options can be set in configuration files and on the command line. The main configuration file is called cyphesis.vconf, and server settings are stored in the [cyphesis] section. The file can be found in the cyphesis source directory, and is installed into the sysconf directory, which is by default /etc. Settings in this configuration file can be overridden in on the command line, and once overridden they will be stored permanently in .cyphesis.vconf in the users home directory. In order to drop back to the default settings, remove this file. Settings can be incrementally overridden in ~/.cyphesis.vconf non-interactively by passing them as command line options to cyconf. cyconf will store any settings it is given in ~/.cyphesis.vconf and then exited. If you are planning to have multiple servers run on the same system at the same or different times, the easiest way to handle the differences in configuration would be to use the ~/.cyphesis.vconf file, and avoid modifying the master configuration file.

As an example, the ruleset to be used is set in cyphesis.vconf as follows:

   [cyphesis]
   ruleset="deeds"

This setting can be overridden by invoking cyphesis with the following option:

   --cyphesis:ruleset=werewolf

For more details of varconf usage see the Varconf documentation. For full details on configuraton options for cyphesis, see the cyphesis(1) man page.

The ruleset specified indicates the entity types available, the set of scripts that will be used for these entities, and the initialisation script used to populate the server.

If an empty server is started, it will automatically be populated if the Worldforge Worlds definitions have been installed.

The default ruleset for this version is called Deeds.

Before you start the server for the first time, you will need to load some data into the server's database tables. You will first have to load ruleset data into the database. If this is the first time you have run cyphesis, you will need to set it up so cyphesis has access. In order to use databases, cyphesis needs to know the name of an account it can use, and the name of a database where it can create its tables. By default it uses the current user name to connect to PostgreSQL, and the name cyphesis for the database. It has been assumed that PostgreSQL has been set up as it is on most systems to accept a local connection from a user with the same name as the database account name without a password. If you want to go through the setup of the database manually, or for some reason cyphesis-setup does not work, you will need to create a database account with the right name, and a database belonging to that account called cyphesis, or whatever name you choose to call it. For information on how to do this, please see the PostgreSQL documentation provided with the version you have installed.

Once cyphesis has access to the database, run cypasswd with no arguments to set the admin password to something unique.

A ruleset will need to be loaded into the database before you can do anything useful with the server. Each ruleset optionally depends on another ruleset, so in addition to the ruleset you are using you will need to load the rulesets on which it depends. A ruleset is distributed with cyphesis as an atlas xml file. The default is mason.xml, which depends on acorn.xml, which in turn depends on basic.xml. These three rulesets can be loaded into the database using the cyloadrules command with no arguments as follows:

   $ cyloadrules
   Reading rules from mason
   49 classes stored in rule database.
   Reading rules from basic
   29 classes stored in rule database.
   $

This automatically loads the rulesets in order into the database, first ensuring that the rules table is empty.

cyloadrules can also be used to load individual rulesets into the database as follows:

   $ cyloadrules mason.xml
   49 classes stored in rule database.
   $ cyloadrules basic.xml
   29 classes stored in rule database.
   $

You will only need to do this if you are developing new rulesets, or customising existing ones.

The database store is persistent. If new a ruleset is provided, it will be necessary to clear the database tables before loading them with new data.

Copyright notices

The server code in C++ is distributed under the GNU General Public License. See the file COPYING for details. The script files included with this distribution are also distributed under the GNU General Public License. Note that this copyright does not cover user scripts that use server services but do not use code from the scripts provided. Using such scripts is considered ordinary use of the server, and does not fall under the heading of derived work.

How to help

If you're interested in helping out with development you should check out these resources:

• The main Worldforge site
• Bugs and feature planning on Launchpad
• Gitter conversation
• Mailing lists