smpsave - Dynamic Provisioner for Private Game Servers

Save money hosting private game servers on demand.

• Start and stop your game server on demand through Discord, let your friends do the same.
• Back up server files between restarts.
• Automatically shut off the server to save on costs.

See documentation for more info.

Installing

Install as a standalone tool with uv:

uv tool install smpsave

This puts smpsave-cli on your PATH in its own isolated environment. You can also run it without installing:

uvx --from smpsave smpsave-cli --help

Or install via pip:

pip install smpsave

To install from a checkout of this repository:

uv tool install .

Developing

Create the virtualenv and install all dependencies (including dev and docs tools):

uv sync

Run the CLI from the checkout:

uv run smpsave-cli --help

Build the docs:

uv run sphinx-build docs docs/_build

Testing and code quality

Run the unit tests with pytest:

uv run pytest

Lint with ruff (add --fix to auto-fix):

uv run ruff check
uv run ruff check --fix

Check or apply formatting with ruff (use --check to verify without changing files):

uv run ruff format --check
uv run ruff format

Type-check with mypy:

uv run mypy smpsave

Building

Build the sdist and wheel into dist/:

uv build

Releasing

1. Bump the version:

   uv version --bump patch   # or minor, major
   

2. Commit pyproject.toml and uv.lock, then push.
3. Publish a GitHub release with the tag v<version> (e.g. v0.2.3). This triggers the PyPI deploy workflow.

Elevator pitch

Want a dedicated server powerful enough for your favorite game, but don't want to pay a cloud host nearly $50 per month? Use smpsave to only pay for what you need.

Let's say you play on your private game server 10 hours a week.

Billing before using smpsave:

• Linode 8GB shared CPU, running 24/7 for all ~720 hours in a month: $48
• With only ~40 hours of actual play, ~94% of that cost is wasted money.

Billing after using smpsave:

• Linode 8GB shared CPU, running 10 hours a week or ~40 hours a month: $2.88

While this could be achieved by having someone manually provision the server as needed, that individual becomes a single point of failure for keeping the game running. By exposing the server controls through Discord, anyone in the group can spin up the server when they want to play.