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.
Example usage¶
Note
This command will automatically include any apps that have been selected using select-apps
, regardless of any additional optional flags specified.
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
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. |