gbans

gbans was initially intended to be a more modern & secure replacement for sourcebans / sourcebans++. It has since had its scope expanded to include more optional support for general game server management tasks as well as future plans for in depth plater stat tracking.

Stability / Usage Notice

While we currently are dogfooding the project on a community with around 50 servers, I would not recommend non-developers use the project yet. It's still in fairly major development mode and large sections are still incomplete or function but very rough. This is very notable for the web frontend which we don't really use yet. Sticking with the discord command interface is the best current way to interact with the system.

Before we tag a 1.0.0 release, we will write some proper user-facing documentation.

Primary differences from sourcebans++

• No direct SQL queries across networks. Exposing MySQL to the internet is a very poor security practice. You can of course mitigate this with firewalls and sql accounts with ip restrictions or VPNs, but the majority of server admins will not ever do this.
• Game servers authenticate with the gbans server upon startup of the plugin. Subsequent requests will use the returned authentication token.
• Communication over HTTPS
• Discord bot integration for administration & announcements.
• Built using Go & PostgreSQL. It has a built-in webserver that is safe to directly expose to the internet. This means it's not necessary to setup MySQL, Nginx/Apache and PHP on your server.
• Non-legacy codebase that is (hopefully) not a nightmare to hack on.

Features

• General
  • Multi server support
  • Global bans
  • Docker support
  • ACME (Lets encrypt / Zero SSL) protocol support for automatic SSL certificates
  • Import/Export of gbans databases
  • Backend linking of gbans services to enable use of other operators lists in real-time.
  • Multi-tenant support
• Game support
  • Team Fortress 2
• Blocking lists & types
  • Valves source server banip config
  • Existing sourcebans database
  • CIDR/IP bans
  • tf2_bot_detector
  • Known VPN Networks
  • Known non-residential addresses
  • Known proxies
  • FireHOL databases
• Database support
  • Postgresql w/PostGIS
• Remote Agent
  • Install & Update game installations
  • Apply custom configs and plugins per server
  • Relay game logs to central service
• SourceMod Plugin
  • Game server authentication
  • Restrict banned players from connecting
  • Restrict muted/gagged players on join
  • /gb_ban <player_id|steam_id> duration Reason Ban a user
  • /gb_unban Unban a previously banned user
  • /gb_kick Kick a user
  • /gb_mod or /mod <message> Call for a mod on discord
• User Interfaces
  • CLI
  • Discord
  • Web
  • Matrix
• Game server logs event storage and processing
  • Remote relay agent gbans relay -h
  • Parsing
  • Indexing
  • Querying

Docker

Docker is recommended to run gbans. You can find the official docker images at dockerhub.

Assuming you have created your config file and have a database setup you can run it using something like:

docker run -it --rm -v `$(pwd)`/gbans.yml:/app/gbans.yml:ro leighmacdonald/gbans:latest

There is also a docker-compose config you can use which provides the database as well.

docker-compose -f docker/docker-compose.yml up --build --remove-orphans --abort-on-container-exit --exit-code-from gbans

Documentation

For installation, configuration and usage instruction, developer notes, please see the docs directory.