Connect a game server

This is the second of the two installs, and it happens on the machine that runs your game server. One binary deploys the plugin, installs the sidecar, registers its service, and prints four values for you to paste into the website.

It never contacts your website, and it never starts or stops your shard.

What gets deployed

#	Component	Where it goes
1	The plugin overlay — C# source ServUO compiles at boot	into your ServUO tree
2	The uo-link sidecar — a small Rust service	a system directory, plus a service
3	A record of the run	install.json, with per-file hashes and backups

ServUO shard ──loopback TCP 127.0.0.1:7788──► uo-link sidecar ──HTTP + WebSocket──► website

The shard dials out. It never listens for the website and is never reachable from the internet; only the sidecar is exposed, and only to your site.

Install

1. Download the binary for your OS, and SHA256SUMS, from the installer releases page (v0.1.1).

   Releases are unsigned — there is no code-signing certificate, so that checksum file is the whole trust anchor. Check it:

   sha256sum -c SHA256SUMS --ignore-missing
   chmod +x runicgateway-installer-linux-x86_64

   On Windows, (Get-FileHash .\runicgateway-installer-windows-x86_64.exe -Algorithm SHA256).Hash and compare. Windows will also show a SmartScreen prompt on first run, for the same reason.

2. Stop the shard. ServUO.exe locks Scripts.dll and rewrites Saves/ on exit, so the installer refuses to deploy under a running server.

3. Run it, elevated.

   sudo ./runicgateway-installer-linux-x86_64 install

   Add --verify first if you want to see every change it would make and write nothing.

   It asks four things: your ServUO root, whether to apply the optional patch tier, the hostname your website should use to reach this machine, and your site’s URL (used only to print a link at the end).

4. Read the summary. It reports the overlay sync file by file, the sidecar binary and its verified hash, the config and database paths, and the service state. Then it says what you must do next — restart ServUO yourself, because it will not do that for you.

It installs a bundle, not “latest of each”

The three components version independently but must agree on one wire protocol, so what it resolves is a bundle: an exact, protocol-checked pair of sidecar and overlay versions (2026.09.10 today — sidecar v2.2.0, overlay v1.2.0). --bundle <tag> pins an exact past combination, so a reinstall in six months reproduces today’s install rather than tomorrow’s.

The patch tier is optional

Most of the plugin is added files, which is why the base install is a safe copy. Two features need edits to stock ServUO sources, and those are opt-in, off unless you say yes, and refused where the target lines are not stock. Skipping the tier costs you vendor-sale events and in-game moderation audit forwarding; everything else works.

The tier is written and tested against stock ServUO 57.4. On any other version it is unsupported and untested, and the prompt makes you answer past a warning.

Paste the four values into the site

A successful run ends by printing the one step it cannot do for you:

  Base URL          http://shard.example.com:8080
  WebSocket URL     ws://shard.example.com:8080/ws
  Protocol version  4
  Auth token        4f9c…   (also in sidecar.toml)

Every value comes from asking the installed sidecar itself, so it cannot drift from what the service actually runs.

On the site, sign in as an administrator and open Shard (uo-link) in the admin sidebar — /admin/uo/link. Tick Enable the shard integration, paste Base URL, WebSocket URL, Auth token and Protocol, and save. The ingest client restarts immediately.

Installer v0.1.0 prints an older path for that screen

v0.1.0 prints …/admin/shard. Since the shard screens became part of the uo module — and a module owns one path segment wherever it appears — the screen moved to /admin/uo/link.

The old path does not fail visibly: the site has no route for it, so it sends you to the dashboard, and that looks like the link worked. The four values you were just told to paste then have nowhere to go. Use the sidebar, or the path above.

Fixed in v0.1.1, which prints the real path. Only matters if you are running the older binary.

The token is encrypted at rest and never returned to any client — losing it means reading it back from sidecar.toml on the shard host, not from the website.

If the website is on a different machine

The sidecar binds 127.0.0.1:8080, reachable only from the shard host. If the site runs elsewhere, widen the bind and then narrow the access:

1. Set [web] bind in sidecar.toml to 0.0.0.0:8080 and restart the service.
2. Firewall that port to your website’s address only. The auth token is always on, but it travels as a plain bearer token — the sidecar speaks HTTP, not HTTPS.
3. If the two hosts are not on a trusted network, put the sidecar behind a TLS reverse proxy or a VPN link and give the website the https:// / wss:// URLs.

Leave [shard] bind on 127.0.0.1:7788. That socket accepts inbound commands to the game, and being loopback-only is what makes that safe.

Next: Verify the whole stack — because a successful file copy is not a working bridge.