Requirements

• Raspberry Pi 4 or 5 (4gb or 8gb)
• 64bit OS - Raspberry Pi OS recommended

Starting from a fresh sd card image write, boot up your pi:

Login to the pi and setup your username/password (or login using your predefined login/password when you created the sd card image)

Make sure the pi is up-to-date with the following

sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo reboot

You can use the account you've created or defaulted to, or you can even create an account to use specifically for ACEmulator.

For illustrative purposes, this guide will assume you're creating a new account specific for ACE.

This account will be called: acepi and you can substitute any reference to it with your chosen account name.

Optional account creation:

Login to your pi with existing account or setup your pi following the Getting Started guide from Raspberry Pi

Create the user, follow the prompts

sudo adduser acepi

then

sudo usermod -aG sudo acepi
sudo reboot

Next, all of the following commands assume you're logging in to and using this optional account. Again, you can substitute this with the initial account you set up your pi with.

Download and install docker:

curl -sSL https://get.docker.com | sh
sudo usermod -aG docker acepi
sudo reboot

Download docker compose and environment scripts for ACE from GitHub

mkdir ACE
cd ACE
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ACEmulator/ACE/master/docker-compose.yml
wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ACEmulator/ACE/master/docker.env

To change the name of world to whatever you want before the first launch, you can do the following command

For this example, we'll change the default of ACEmulator to piACE

sed -i 's/ACE_WORLD_NAME=ACEmulator/ACE_WORLD_NAME=piACE/' docker.env

To change the name of your world after first launch, you will need to edit the Config.js file found at ~/ACE/Config/Config.js There is not much else that needs to be changed in this file but you may want to take a look at it to see the defaults below

Optionally change other initial setup options:

There are other default configurations you can change before the initial launch, found in docker.env. These include default mysql usernames and passwords, feel free to change as you wish. Remember that to change these settings after first launch, you will need to edit the Config.js file found at ~/ACE/Config/Config.js

nano docker.env

Finally before you start ACE, you'll need provide DAT files for the server to use.

If you want to download the server DAT files instead of copying them in from elsewhere

sudo apt-get install -y megatools p7zip-full
megadl 'https://mega.nz/#!Q98n0BiR!p5IugPS8ZkQ7uX2A_LdN3Un2_wMX4gZBHowgs1Qomng'
7z x ac-updates.zip -oDats *.dat
rm ac-updates.zip

You must provide DAT files for the server to use, without them ACEmulator will not start.

Start ACE

docker compose up -d

To access the ACE console

docker container attach --sig-proxy=false ace-server

To access the docker compose logs

docker compose logs -f

Restart ACE

docker compose restart

Stop ACE

docker compose down

Update ACE to latest released master

docker compose down
docker compose pull
docker compose up -d