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Host and run free games claimer in the cloud periodically

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Jannis Hell edited this page Jun 4, 2023 · 1 revision

In order to periodically run the free-games-claimer it's best to host it somewhere, so that you don't have to run it always manually from your local machine.

There are some free providers out there, one that allows you to run docker is Oracle Cloud.

Recently I was introduced Oracle cloud, and its free tier for an unlimited time. Check the supported always free services:

  • 2 AMD based Compute VMs with 1/8 OCPU** and 1 GB memory each
  • 4 Arm-based Ampere A1 cores and 24 GB of memory usable as one VM or up to 4 VMs
  • 2 Block Volumes Storage, 200 GB total
  • 10 GB Object Storage — Standard
  • 10 GB Object Storage — Infrequent Access
  • 10 GB Archive Storage
  • Resource Manager: managed Terraform
  • 5 OCI Bastions

As you can see they are very generous with their free tier, and we can do a lot with this.

Create your remote Docker service

Create an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure account (just follow this link). Install terraform. Install OCI CLI . Configure OCI credentials. As you can suspect by now, we are going to use terraform to provision our Docker service. Basically terraform will create one VM instance as big as the free tier allow us, and make it ready so we can ssh into the machine and have docker ready to start our containers.

  1. Checkout remote-docker project with the terraform configuration and enter its directory.

  2. Run terraform init and terraform apply in that directory

If you get an error like this:

timeout -- last error: dial tcp IP_ADDRESS:22: connect: connection refused

try to add the id_rsa generated by terraform to your ssh-agent ( ssh-add id_rsa ) and run terraform apply one (or more) more time(s), the id_rsa should be localized in the root of the project.

If you were able to reach this point, you now have a VM running that you can run whatever you want (check Oracle's terms and conditions for this service). At the end of the process terraform is configured to show the public IP of the newly created instance.

You will see something like this at the end of the terraform script when it ran successfully:

ssh-with-docker-user = "ssh -l docker -p 22 -i {SOMEIPADDRESS} # docker-1"

you will need to slightly change the command in order for it to work:

ssh -l docker -p 22 -i {PATH_TO_id_rsa} {SOMEIPADDRESS}

so let's say you are still in the folder where you ran terraform then the id_rsa file will be in the same folder - let's assume the IP is 123.456.789.0

ssh -l docker -p 22 -i id_rsa 123.456.789.0

What you also can do is to add this IP to /etc/hosts so you don't need to call it by the IP address.

Connect to the remote server using the ssh command from above and run docker ps to check if docker is running as expected.

Now you can run

docker run --rm -it -p 6080:6080 -v fgc:/fgc/data --pull=always ghcr.io/vogler/free-games-claimer

and watch the magic happen. You can simultaneously connect to your IP address http://123.456.789.0:6080 and observe that everything works as expected.

Run the script periodically

To periodically run things we are going to use a cronjob.

As described here you can add the above docker command with a slight change to crontab to run it at any given time.

Further down in the discussion you can also find a version that writes to a logfile - so you can check every now and then what happened.

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