jpvelasco/ludus

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Ludus

The fastest way to build, cook, and deploy Unreal Engine 5 dedicated servers.

One command. Multiple backends. Production-ready GameLift, EC2, or binary output.

# Full pipeline in one command
ludus run

Now with official UE 5.8 support, Zen DDC as default, OpenTelemetry observability, and AWS Account ID masking.

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A CLI tool that automates the end-to-end pipeline for deploying Unreal Engine 5 dedicated servers to AWS GameLift.

Ludus handles the entire workflow that would otherwise require dozens of manual steps across multiple tools: UE5 source builds, game server compilation, Docker containerization, ECR push, and GameLift fleet deployment. For local development, GameLift Anywhere mode skips containers entirely — fleet creation takes seconds instead of minutes. While Lyra (Epic's sample game) is the default project, Ludus supports any UE5 game with dedicated server targets.

This repository is the UE5 / GameLift CLI. It is unrelated to other products named Ludus.

Quickstart

# Install
npm install -g ludus-cli

# Configure (edit ludus.yaml with your engine path and AWS settings)
ludus setup

# Validate your environment
ludus init --verbose

# Run the full pipeline
ludus run --verbose

Prerequisites at a glance: UE5 source build, Docker/Podman, AWS CLI v2, Go 1.25.13+, 16 GB RAM, 300 GB disk (native) / 2 TB disk (container builds recommended). macOS (Apple Silicon/Intel) supported via container backends only. See detailed prerequisites below.

What it does

ludus run --verbose

This single command orchestrates six stages:

• Prerequisite validation — OS, engine source, game content, Docker, AWS CLI, disk space, RAM
• Engine build — UE5 source compilation (Setup.sh, project files, make)
• Game server build — Dedicated server packaging via RunUAT BuildCookRun
• Container build — Dockerfile generation and Docker image build
• ECR push — Docker image push to Amazon ECR
• GameLift deploy — Container fleet creation with IAM roles and polling