Hey fellow self-hosters!

It’s u/Alfagun74 from GameVault, the self-hosted platform for organizing and sharing your servers DRM-free games collection. We’ve come a long way since our initial release, and I’m thrilled to share what’s been happening with GameVault since then.

From “Crackpipe” to GameVault

If you’ve been with us since the start, you might remember our initial quirky name, “Crackpipe.” Well, we had a good laugh, but as we grew, we decided to go for something more fitting – GameVault! It’s your personal gaming treasure trove, and the name says it all.

What’s GameVault?

For the uninitiated, GameVault is like having your own Steam for game files lying on your server. It’s a self-hosted, source-available gaming platform. Bring your DRM-free game files, and GameVault organizes them, enriches them with metadata, and gives you a user-friendly interface to manage and play your games. It’s all about enjoying your favorite titles with friends.

What’s happened since initial release?

Since our initial release four months ago, we’ve been hard at work, reaching version 9 on the backend and 1.7 on the frontend.

Here’s a reel of the exciting big features we’ve added:

  1. Auto Extraction and Installation of Videogames
  2. Uninstalling Games through GameVault
  3. Uploading Images directly to your GameVault
  4. Support for a metric ton of archive formats
  5. Crash Reports
  6. Database Backups & Restorations
  7. Bandwidth Control
  8. Random Game Finder

What’s on the Horizon?

We’ve been listening to your feedback, and here’s what was asked for the most:

  1. UI Redesign for the Library and Installations Tab
  2. Support for ROMS and Emulators
  3. Support for extra files like Soundtracks etc.

Right now we’re knee-deep in redesigning the Library, the heart of our application. Big changes are on the way, waving goodbye to the installations tab and bringing in a sleeker UI for Library, Game View, and Game Settings. More on and a sneak-peek is coming to our blog soon.

Join the GameVault Community!

If you haven’t already, come join our vibrant community on Discord. You can influence the direction of GameVault and participate in exclusive polls over there.

Spread the Word and Stay Tuned!

Help us promote GameVault among fellow self-hosters. Your efforts could inspire a bored developer to join and contribute to our project!

Let’s make gaming personal again with GameVault!

  • @MrSupremoBEnglish
    2•8 months ago

    This is a really interesting project!

    However, I was reading through the documentation and it seems that you have to upload files manually (i.e. Interact directly with the servers file system). I think having the functionality to upload games from a client would make adoption much easier.

    At least for me, I would have installed this on my server, had I seen that feature

    • @Alfagun74OPBEnglish
      1•8 months ago

      I get the point and we already consider implementing a convenient upload like this at some point.

    • @Alfagun74OPBEnglish
      1•8 months ago

      its the other way around, but thanks for linking them

  • @SupertrinkoBEnglish
    1•8 months ago

    Interesting! Been using Playnite for a while, good to see another player in the personal game library… game.

    • @Alfagun74OPBEnglish
      1•8 months ago

      We even plan an integration to playnite at some point

  • @wiseoxejahBEnglish
    1•8 months ago

    Been using it for quite a while now. It really makes gaming with family and friends easy. Many thanks to the Phalcode team for their hard work and amazing support on discord!

  • @moarmagicBEnglish
    1•8 months ago

    A minor feature rq but one that steam vitally misses somehow: along with rating and parental controls, of you create social aspects like see users games /what user is playing, a way to privatize specific content from those features. I have nsfw games. Not everyone I’m going to invite to my game stuff needs to know about them.

  • @Haldi4803BEnglish
    1•8 months ago

    That’s not something you use with your Friends, thats something for Family.

    ​

    Why? Because what about your Other friends? They also got their own instance of GameVault running. Now what?

    Next step if you want to make this widely used would be Multi Server compatibility. So you can add multiple Servers like Repositories and keep connected with friends from different servers.

  • @LordingardBEnglish
    1•8 months ago

    Hello, not working for me with SQLLite, I have this error in logs : SqliteError: unable to open database file.

    Here my docker run script :

    docker run -d --name gamevault \

    --network anynetwork \

    --hostname gamevault \

    --restart=always \

    -e DB_SYSTEM="SQLITE" \

    -e RAWG_API_KEY=XXX \

    -e SERVER_ADMIN_USERNAME=admin \

    -v /media/jeux:/files \

    -v /gamevault/images:/images \

    -v /gamevault/db:/db \

    -p 8080:8080 \

    phalcode/gamevault-backend:latest

    Any idea ?

    Thanks !