steam-lancache-prefill

The documentation structure follows this layout:

• mkdocs.yml: The root configuration file for MkDocs.
• mkdocs/: The directory containing all documentation content.
  • index.md: The homepage of the documentation.
  • assets/: Custom JavaScript and CSS files.
  • custom_theme/: Theme-specific files.
  • img/: Images.
  • img/svg/: SVG images (including rendered .ansi files from the parent directory).
  • ...: Various other markdown pages and assets.

Steam uses internal identifiers called CellId to manage Content Delivery Network (CDN) regions.

Important Limitations:

• Manual Overrides: As of 2024-10-04, it is no longer possible to manually choose a CDN region in Steam for downloads. While the Steam client may show a list of regions in the 'Download Region' setting, Steam automatically determines the optimal download region based on internal geolocation criteria. Setting an override region typically has no effect on which region your client actually uses.
• Login vs. Download: You may still be able to choose a region for logging into Steam, but this is distinct from the download region selection.
• Region Validity: Many regions listed in the Steam client do not actually exist. Only regions corresponding to valid CellId values are functional.

To install the application on Windows, follow these steps:

1. Go to the GitHub Releases page for the repository.
2. Download the latest Windows version (the filename follows the pattern steam-lancache-prefill-X.Y.Z-win-x64.zip).
3. Unzip the downloaded archive to any directory on your system.

To update your cache with newer versions of previously selected games, simply run the prefill command again.

SteamPrefill tracks the version of each app. It will:

• Skip apps that are already up to date.
• Re-download only the new data for apps that have a newer version available.

Because of how Lancache works, updates are typically much faster than the initial prefill because existing data is retrieved from the local cache while only new update data is fetched from the internet.

# On Linux
./SteamPrefill prefill

# On Windows
.\SteamPrefill.exe prefill

Once the .timer and .service files are created, use the following commands to reload the systemd daemon, enable the timer immediately, and enable the service:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload
sudo systemctl enable --now {{prefill_name.lower()}}.timer
sudo systemctl enable {{prefill_name.lower()}}

You can run the project using dotnet run. By default, this runs in Debug mode, which is useful for development but slower than Release mode.

To pass arguments to the application, use the -- separator after the run command.

To run the project with full optimizations (equivalent to a production build), use the --configuration Release flag.

# Run in Debug mode (default)
dotnet run

# Run with specific command arguments (e.g., prefill all apps)
dotnet run -- prefill --all

# Run in Release mode for full speed
dotnet run --configuration Release

If the repository is already cloned without submodules, run:

git submodule update --init --recursive

git clone --recurse-submodules -j8 https://github.com/tpill90/steam-lancache-prefill.git

If you need to ensure the cache is 100% primed or want to perform diagnostics/benchmarking, use the --force (or -f) flag. This overrides the default behavior of only downloading updates and forces the tool to re-download every selected app from scratch, filling in any potentially missing data.

# Force re-download of all apps
./{{prefill_name}} prefill --force

SteamPrefill is a portable application that can be run on a Lancache server or a gaming machine. It supports Windows, Linux, MacOS, Arm64, Docker, and Unraid.

Detailed setup guides are available for specific platforms:

• Linux
• Docker
• unRAID
• Windows

Use the select-apps status command to list all currently selected applications and their respective download sizes.

Note: The reported download size is the compressed size used by Steam for downloading, which will be smaller than the actual final installation size on disk.

./{{prefill_name}} select-apps status