I think Terraria is a great game, and according to Steam I've spent 572 hours of my life in it.

I'm eagerly awaiting the 1.4 update, and when its out I want to run a server and start over with some friends.

While waiting, I thought I'd get a head start on the server setup. Rather than manually launch a virtual machine from a cloud vendor's user interface and then running some ad-hoc commands to experiment, I thought I'd automate things from the beginning with infrastructure as code using Terraform.

After about a day's work, I ended up with a Terraform project which deploys a DigitalOcean droplet with appropriate firewall rules, then runs TShock in screen properly supervised by systemd. The entire setup is fully automated—no action is required (other than a bit of waiting) between running terraform apply and joining the server in-game.

The code and instructions can be found on GitHub:

Here's the obligatory disclaimer that things are still a little rough around the edges. For one, many things are still hardcoded, such as droplet size and world name.