steam install now requires login/platform switching workaround no longer works

[sneakers-the-rat]

hello! thanks for this, after awhile searching, this was the only thing that actually worked to run a dedicated server.

i'm trying to make a downstream image that just adds some additional mods from the steam workshop and bundles my config in for convenience (not intending for general use, just for my and my friends) and i'm finding i can't build either my image or this one.

the install script mentions an issue: ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux#11522

however things seem to have changed and that platform hack workaround no longer works. when trying to install manually, i am able to get it to work by logging in with a temporary steam account, so it seems like that change has finally taken effect and anonymous installs are no longer allowed at all.

I'm not exactly sure how to automate putting in the password from the steam account during the install script, so i'm a bit stuck and have resorted to just running commands directly within the docker container, but just thought i'd bring this to your attention/make an issue for discussion. i figure this is just a for funzies project for y'all like it is for me, so no hurry or expectation, thanks for putting this together! and i'm not a docker expert, so sorry if this is a "just me" problem.

[hazmeister]

Seasons Greetings!

Certainly seems like something is more broken than when I last looked. You've got a couple of options here, the easiest of which is to use the last image I pushed as a base image, then add your customisations on top. You can replace me entrypoint.sh with your own, and add your own addons, something like

FROM left4devops/l4d2

ADD entrypoint.sh  .

ADD mods/* /addons/.

To answer your original question, I have a branch called authed-dl which was my original attempt at fixing the issue before the windows install workaround was shared on that ticket. That branch mounts a credential file temporarily as part of the build, which allows a cached login to be used, so you can skip adding a password or mfa token after login $USERNAME. The file is generated the first time you login. Don't add it to the repo, or your account may be abused. I suspect this method will break updating the game, although it's been nearly a year since the last patch, so that may be less of a problem.

[sneakers-the-rat]

thanks for the reply!

Yes! just extending the existing image did the trick, and i have been able to get mods and addons working using direct downloads from 3rd party sites (the steamcmd workshop install doesn't seem to work, but i don't think that's anything to do with this repo/image).

That should work until/unless steam breaks something on their end, so my initial problem is all sorted, feel free to close or leave open if you want to track the issue generally.

it does seem like handling auth will be something that's required going forward, so that code being merged would probably be nice to have, but the image does work as-is for now, so it's easy to do that in downstream images too.

(thx again! there was some recent serverside change that made it impossible to use mod maps on any non-local server, so this image made it possible for us to finally play custom maps as a group!)

[hazmeister]

No worries! BTW, If you're looking steamcmd to download workshop content, you need to be logged in as an account with the game purchased, then there's some minor work to rename and move the files to the right directory.

[sneakers-the-rat]

Sorry for long comment, im just sort of idly chatting here in case its useful to anyone who stumbles in via search since my initial issue has been resolved and it sounds like yall know what the fix is, if one is actually needed

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I have tried both anonymous login and authenticated login, forcing install directories and not, and it always just emits a "Download failed (Failure)" error message. We ended up just resorting to https://github.com/sneakers-the-rat/l4d2-docker-mods/blob/1f108f7953aaf989f570360f935cf124eed59fd4/install-base-mods.sh#L30-L37 because we wanted to get playing.

Thats extremely janky and fragile but it worked at least one time lol. I dont have a good enough sense of how to structure docker images to provide optional layers, and some of the mod maps are quite large, so we just resorted to doing that post-build in the entrypoint script for things that are larger than a few MB, selecting different things to download using env vars. that was sort of the initial idea, to build up an extended image over time with "sensible defaults" for mods and optional mod packs and maps and whatnot, since playing mod maps on official servers is no longer supported (idk if it ever was? But its not now ). No idea if something like that already exists, it seems like it probably does, but i was not able to find it.

edit: it also might be the case that this image works while installing the new l4d2 dedicated server directly with steamcmd doesn't because its an old version, before the changes reported in that above thread on 2025-08-12, so maybe updating the image is not desirable?

Maybe its just me, ill try again logged in on my linux box and check. In any case it seems like the "fix" to be made is the same, provide creds to the image.

If you have a better example of installing mods in the image or otherwise that would be awesome (i do see that you mapped the addons folder as a volume, which is awesome, but basically same deal - cant get steamCMD to download the mods on the host system so that i can copy them in there).