Setup an SA-MP San Andreas Multiplayer Server on CentOS 6

Welcome to another Vultr tutorial. Here, you’ll learn how to install and run a SAMP server. This guide was written for CentOS 6.

Prerequisites

You will need “screen” to keep the server running when you exit your SSH client (such as PuTTY). Installing “screen” is simple and only requires you to perform one command.

yum install -y screen

Installing the server software

Create a new directory and retrieve the SA-MP software. The “wget” below uses the latest version from the time this article was posted. You may visit the official site to check for newer releases.

cd /
mkdir samp-server
wget http://team.sa-mp.com/files/samp03dsvr_R2.tar.gz

Extract the “tar” file.

tar -zxf samp037svr_R2.tar.gz

Enter the “samp03” folder and edit the configuration file. Make any configuration changes that you would like during this step.

cd samp03
vi server.cfg

Running the server

This is the easy part. First, we must open up a “screen” session. You can change “server” to any name you’d like for easier access back to the “screen” session.

screen -S server

Start the SA-MP server.

./samp03svr

At this point, the server is running. You may leave it running and detach from your screen session by pressing Ctrl+A, then D.

If you require access to the server console again, you can return to the screen with the following command. Update the “server” string if you changed it earlier.

screen -r server

Congratulations! You have installed and started an SA-MP server.