Using Serverthrall

I'm writing this guide to help people understand how to use ServerThrall.

What is Serverthrall?

ServerThrall is pretty simple. All it does is keep a copy of Conan Exiles dedicated server downloaded in a folder called vendor. ServerThrall is just a separate program that starts up and makes sure the server is running, and most of the features supported exist purely in the ServerThrall application and don't modify the Conan Exiles server itself.

That means, that regardless of ServerThrall managing your server can be done entirely through the server in the vendor folder, as if you weren't using ServerThrall at all.

How do I configure or enable plugins?

All the functionality in ServerThrall are included in different plugins. These plugins are included in serverthrall.exe already. You don't need to install anything extra to get the plugins. All you need to do, is turn the plugins on by changing serverthrall.config. Every plugin has a section inside of serverthrall.config. Let's look at an example below.

[ServerConfig]
enabled = true
ServerName = Best Server Ever
AdminPassword = ilovefruit

Imagine that this is inside your serverthrall.config file. The [ServerConfig] tells serverthrall that the options after it belong to the ServerConfig plugin. The configuration options for each plugin, are determined by that plugin. Every plugin however, has the enabled option which enables that plugin. If enabled is false, that plugin will not run.

Note: As a side note, some plugins depend on other plugins. For instance, the ServerRestarter requires the RestartManager plugin to have enabled=true or else it cannot function. And likewise, ServerRestarter requires the Discord plugin to be enabled or it cannot send discord messages to your discord server.

Let's look at the documentation for ServerConfig here, https://github.com/NullSoldier/serverthrall/wiki/Server-Config-Plugin. You can see all the possible options for ServerConfig in the table under Configuration. From here, we can learn what options are possible for each section of the serverthrall.config file.

It tells us if we specify ServerName, this option will change the name of our conan server in the server list. If you scroll to the bottom of every plugins documentation, you can see a quick example of how you might configure your own server using this plugin.

How do I figure out what is going wrong??

Honestly, the best way to try to figure out issues is to join the discord. Other than that there are a few tools you can use to debug problems you're having.

Enabling more verbose logs

ServerThrall logs of everything that ServerThrall does inside a file called serverthrall.log. The contents of this file are the same as the messages you see in the serverthrall.exe console window.

Note This file is never rotated, so you may want to delete it from time to time.

Serverthrall is careful about spamming the logs with useless messages by default, but if you are running into issues you may want to enable full logging to find an issue. Every plugin has an option called log_level that you can set to different options found below.

• log_level = debug All messages are printed, useful for debugging
• log_level = info Most messages are printed, this is the default settings
• log_level = warning Only warnings and errors are printed
• log_level = error Only errors and critical issues are printed
• log_level = critical Only the most critical problems are printed

[Discord]
enabled = true
log_level = debug