how to allocate a Local Game Server?

[goace]

the doc only shows how to register a local server to agones, but how can I allocate it ?

[roberthbailey]

Which doc are you referring to?

Whenever I need a refresher for how to allocate, I look at https://agones.dev/site/docs/getting-started/create-fleet/#4-allocate-a-game-server-from-the-fleet

For easier discovery, I wonder if moving that to a separate page under the getting started guides would make sense.

[goace]

@roberthbailey Hi, I mean this doc https://agones.dev/site/docs/guides/local-game-server/

How can I allocate a GS which is registered as a local-game-server?

[roberthbailey]

That page says "The game server is not managed by Agones. Features like autoscaling, replication, etc are not available." I wonder if allocation is one of the features that doesn't work.

Maybe @markmandel knows offhand?

[goace]

What's the meaning of registering a local server to agones If it can't be allocated..?

[roberthbailey]

What's the meaning of registering a local server to agones If it can't be allocated..?

You can verify the interaction between the game server and the SDK / sidecar. For example, you can verify that you are sending health pings correctly, you can watch the game server to see when metadata gets applied to it, you can set labels or annotations on the game server and see metadata propagate back to the Kubernetes resource, you can verify that you are calling Ready() at the correct time. If you are using the alpha features, you can set player capacity and call player connect / disconnect as well.

It seems like it should be possible to allocate a local game server though - I just haven't tried testing it myself.

[markmandel]

Sorry, I think there is confusion.

https://agones.dev/site/docs/guides/local-game-server/ refers to registering a local address for QA purposes with an existing Agones cluster. (This is different from the test local server found here), which I think is what you were referring to @roberthbailey.

If you want to allocate that GameServer from the cluster, then you use an Allocation with appropriate selectors that will match against it, just like you would for any other GameServer.

The point of it is that it looks and acts like just about any other GameServer withing the cluster, but the address points to a local instance, to make QA a bit easier to handle, so there is inherently nothing special about how you would Allocate it vs any other GameServer.

[roberthbailey]

So it sounds like it should be allocatable like any other game server and we just need to add some instructions on how to do it.

[markmandel]

Not sure how we can tell you how to do it - other than point you at existing documentation 🤔 . We don't know what labels you are putting on your GameServer, so we don't know how you could allocate.

We could make a note that "you can then allocate as you would do normally, through label selectors", and point to the GameServerAllocation reference? (maybe provide an example?)

Would that make things clearer @goace ?

[goace]

@markmandel thanks for your reply, it make sense.

So I can add a native k8s label to a gameserver, then I can allocate it via "matchLabels" with my custom lable, is that right?

I think you should put that in the docs to make this clear to everyone..

[goace]

I encountered a new problem, I think it's a bug.

I allocated a local game server with my custom label successfully, bug the gameserver's state is still READY.

@markmandel

[goace]

for more information, this is my config files:

# gameserver depolyment
apiVersion: "agones.dev/v1"
kind: GameServer
metadata:
  name: local-gs
  annotations:
    agones.dev/dev-address: "192.168.1.1"
  labels:
    gstype: local
spec:
  ports:
  - name: default
    portPolicy: Static
    hostPort: 17654
    containerPort: 17654
  # The following is ignored but required due to validation.
  template:
    spec:
      containers:
      - name: simple-game-server
        image: gcr.io/agones-images/simple-game-server:0.11

# allocation
apiVersion: "allocation.agones.dev/v1"
kind: GameServerAllocation
spec:
  selectors:
    - matchLabels:
        gstype: local
  scheduling: Packed

[markmandel]

Oooh! Good find! Just replicated this in an e2e test locally.

I'll get a fix into the next release.

[markmandel]

Found the bug! PR incoming. That's been there a long while.

The good news is, since you are managing individual local development GameServers, making sure it stays as Allocated doesn't really matter, as nothing is going to delete it unless you/some system you control does it.