markcrossen/factorio-pi repository overview

⁠factorio-pi

WARNING running factorio server in this way is unstable, slow, and might crash your pi

⁠deprecated

If your pi is running a 64 bit operating system, then it is highly recommend to first try using factoriotools/factorio⁠. To determine whether your pi is 64 bit, run the following from a terminal:

uname -m  # should say 'aarch64' for 64 bit operating system

If your pi is NOT 64 bit, then feel free to try the docker image from this repo. Ultimately both repos will have difficulties because factorio wasn't made to run on ARM hosts.

⁠usage

First, install docker on your raspberry pi

sudo apt install docker.io

Next, create a folder to hold your savegame and the autosaves. Transfer your existing save into it.

mkdir ~/factorio-saves/
mv /path/to/existing/save.zip ~/factorio-saves/

Now create and run the docker container

sudo docker run -d \
  -p 34197:34197/udp \
  -p 27015:27015/tcp \
  -v ~/factorio-saves:/home/factorio/saves \
  --name factorio \
  --restart=unless-stopped \
  markcrossen/factorio-pi

If you're new to docker, lets go over each argument to the above command:

• -d run in 'detached' mode so it doesn't capture keyboard input
• -p 34197:34197/udp -p 27015:27015/tcp the default network ports required to run factorio
• -v ~/factorio-saves:/home/factorio/saves allow the container to read the folder where you placed your save
• -v ~/factorio-settings:/home/factorio/settings allow the container to read the folder where you placed your custom server-settings.json
• --name factorio names the container to make it easier to start and stop
• --restart=unless-stopped restart the container if it crashes
• markcrossen/factorio-pi the docker image to run that contains all dependencies

To stop the server, run the following

sudo docker stop factorio

To [re]start the server, run the following

sudo docker start factorio

⁠problems

The factorio headless linux server is only available for x86 machines but the raspberry pi has an ARM CPU. To run on ARM processors, like the raspberry pi, virtualization is required.

Using virtualization/emulators is slower than running factorio on a normal x86 machine because the emulator has a large overhead.

Emulators like qemu-user-static work great for running statically linked binaries on foreign machines but they don't include all dependancies needed to run dynamically linked executables such as factorio. The latter problem can be solved by shipping all x86 dependencies alongside the emulator and executable. This is most easily done through containerization.