Setup quickstart

The Evennia server is installed, run and maintained from the terminal (console/CMD on Windows). Starting the server doesn't make anything visible online. Once you download everything you can in fact develop your game in complete isolation if you want, without needing any access to the internet.

Installation

Evennia requires Python3.7+. As with most Python packages, using a virtualenv is recommended in order to keep your installation independent from the system libraries. It's not recommended to install Evennia as superuser.

pip install evennia

Make sure the evennia command works. Use evennia -h for usage help (or read on).

If you are having trouble, want to install in some other way (like with Docker) or want to contribute to Evennia itself, check out the Extended Installation instructions. It also has a troubleshooting section for different operating systems.

Initialize a new game

Use cd to enter a folder where you want to do your game development. Here (and in the rest of the Evennia documentation) we call this folder mygame, but you should of course name your game whatever you like:

evennia --init mygame

This will create a new folder mygame (or whatever you chose) in your current location. This contains empty templates and all the default settings needed to start the server.

Start the new game

cd into your game folder (mygame in our case). Next, run

evennia migrate

This will create the default database (Sqlite3). The database file ends up as mygame/server/evennia.db3. If you ever want to start from a fresh database, just delete this file and re-run evennia migrate again.

evennia start

Set your user-name and password when prompted. This will be the "god user" or "superuser" in-game. The email is optional.

If all went well, the server is now up and running. Point a legacy MUD/telnet client to localhost:4000 or a web browser at http://localhost:4001 to play your new (if empty) game!

If localhost doesn't work on your computer, use 127.0.0.1, which is the same thing.

See server logs

This will echol the server logs to the terminal as they come in:

evennia --log

evennia -l

You can also start logging immediately when running evennia commands, such as

evennia start -l

To exit the log view, enter Ctrl-C (Cmd-C for Mac). This will not affect the server.

Restarting and stopping

You can restart the server without disconnecting any connected players:

evennia restart

To do a full stop and restart (will disconnect everyone):

evennia reboot

Full stop of the server (will need to use start to activate it again):

evennia stop

The Next step

Why not head into the Starting Tutorial to learn how to start making your new game!

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