Creating an insta LANparty with AppImages and Ansible

This guide will allow you to setup a script that copies an AppImage to multiple computers in parallel and runs the package on all of them, perfect to quickly distribute games on a LAN party.

1. Setup the hosts

Edit this file and list all the computers you want to run the game on.

/etc/ansible/hosts

[lan]
192.168.69.42
192.168.69.32
192.168.69.33
192.168.69.30
192.168.69.35

2. Setup the Ansible playbook

Place this file anywhere you want, and customize it to suit your AppImage, user, paths, etc.

quake.yml

---
- hosts: lan
  remote_user: user
  vars:
    AppImage: "/home/user/AppImages/ioQuake\ III\ Arena\ XCSV\ Demo\ 1.36-r2-x86.run"
    InstallPath: ".cache/"
  tasks:
  - name: Install game
    copy: src="{{ AppImage }}" dest="{{ InstallPath }}/Game.run" mode=0744
  - name: Run game
    command: "{{ item }} chdir={{ InstallPath }}"
    with_items:
    - "zenity --error --text=\"All your base are belong to us\" --timeout=1"
    - "./Game.run +connect 192.168.69.13"
    environment:
      DISPLAY: :0

3. Run

Run this command on your shell

$ ansible-playbook quake.yml

This will take a while the first time, because it needs to copy the AppImage to all computers, but after that it'll detect the package is already copied and just run all the clients, which will start up at exactly the same time and connect to your server (make sure it's running).