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Server setup

This guide will help you download, set up, and run the Pretendo Network server software on your system.

info

This guide assumes that you are already familiar with using the Linux command line and have a basic understanding of Docker.

Downloading

Clone this repo with Git, and make sure to recursively checkout submodules.

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/MatthewL246/pretendo-docker.git
note

Downloading this repo as a ZIP file from GitHub will not work because it uses Git submodules for the Pretendo Network repos.

Tips for Windows users

If you are using Windows, you should clone the repo inside your WSL distro for multiple reasons.

  • This avoids Git messing with line endings and breaking shell scripts, which it can do when you clone a repo in Windows (due to autocrlf).
  • This maximizes performance because Docker runs inside WSL and copying files between the WSL and Windows filesystems is slow.

Remember that all shell commands should be run inside WSL, not Git Bash in Windows.

Setting up

Open a terminal window inside the repository's directory. Run the initial setup script and follow its instructions. This will take some time to build the required Docker images, and it will use up to 8GB of bandwidth to download images.

./setup.sh

After initial setup, use Docker Compose to build and start the server containers.

docker compose up -d --build
tip

You can now open 127.0.0.1:8081 in your browser to view the mitmproxy web interface. This is where you can view a live list of HTTP requests from client devices, which is incredibly useful for understanding what requests are hitting your server.