prefill¶

Overview¶

Automatically fills a Lancache with games from Steam so that subsequent downloads will be served from the Lancache, improving speeds and reducing load on your internet connection.

Keeps track of which games have been previously downloaded, and will only download games that have updates.

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Example usage¶

Initiating a prefill run is as simple as running the following from the terminal:

./SteamPrefill prefill

At the beginning of a prefill run, SteamPrefill will check to see which apps have new updates since the last prefill run, as well as checking to see if any apps have never been successfully prefilled. If prefill detects that there are any apps that need to be downloaded, it will begin doing so. If there are no apps that need to be downloaded, then the prefill run will simply finish immediately.

Prefilling your entire Steam library¶

Depending on the size of your library, and which apps you want to prefill, it may be easier to simply prefill the entire library instead. This will also automatically include any new games you may have purchased, without having to use select-apps to select the newly purchased game.

./SteamPrefill prefill --all

Ensuring your cache is fully primed¶

Suppose that you have an event coming up, and you want to be 100% certain that your Lancache is prefilled. Normally running prefill will ensure that you have the latest update data primed, however you may want to have complete certainty that it is. Adding the --force flag will make SteamPrefill re-download every app, ignoring the fact that they may have already been up to date from a previous run. Because SteamPrefill will be re-downloading every app again from start to finish, any data that may be missing will be filled in again.

./SteamPrefill prefill --force

Combining multiple flags¶

It is possible to combine multiple flags together in a single command, rather than having to use them separately one at a time. For example, the following command will prefill the most popular games on Steam, only download the Linux version, and display more detailed log output:

./SteamPrefill prefill --top --os linux --verbose

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Options¶

Option		Values	Default
--os		windows, linux, macos	windows	Specifies which operating system(s) games should be downloaded for. Typically, almost all games support Windows, however there are increasingly more games that have Linux specific game files. In some cases, the Linux game files may be as large as the Windows version.
--all				Downloads all owned apps, useful for prefilling a completely empty cache.
--recent				Adds any games played within the last 2 weeks to the download queue.
--top		1-100	50	Downloads the most popular games by player count, over the last 2 weeks.
--force	-f			By default, SteamPrefill will keep track of the most recently prefilled apps, and will only attempt to prefill if there it determines there a newer version available for download. This default behavior will work best for most use cases, as no time will be wasted re-downloading files that have been previously prefilled. Running with the flag --force will override this behavior, and instead will always run the prefill, re-downloading all files for the selected apps. This flag may be useful for diagnostics, or benchmarking network performance.
--verbose				Produces more detailed log output. By default, games that are already up to date will not be displayed at all. Specifying this option will make it so that all games, even ones up to date, will be logged.
--unit		bits, bytes	bits	Specifies which unit to use to display download speed.
--no-ansi				Application output will be in plain text, rather than using the visually appealing colors and progress bars. Should only be used if terminal does not support Ansi Escape sequences, or when redirecting output to a file.