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Mod Hosting Guide


Majiir

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So, you've made a mod - now share it!

There are a lot of ways to host your mod for download, and each has its tradeoffs. Here's a short overview of some of your options.

SpaceDock

The community-built hosting site. SpaceDock has no ads (right now), free, and featuring integration with CKAN, as well as useful download statistics. Decent bandwidth and page load times. Currently maintained by the SpaceDock dev team, you can get in touch with them on the Esper IRC channel #spacedock.

KerbalStuff

Dead for the foreseeable future. You may wish to use SpaceDock instead.

GitHub

If you want one place to manage your project, its code, support requests and all of its releases, GitHub is for you. Its file hosting is rather basic - there's very little in the way of download statistics - but it's free, has no ads and doesn't have a low bandwidth cap. You can use shields.io to get basic metadata. 

Dropbox, Google Drive, MediaFire and others

These sites are free and generally quite easy to use. If you host a large and/or popular mod, you might run into bandwidth limits, but smaller projects should get along just fine. I can't speak to the quality of their download statistics, but it's a notch above GitHub to my knowledge.

CurseForge

Squad has partnered with Curse to allow KSP mods through CurseForge. You can earn revenue for hosting popular mods with Curse, or avoid advertisements by linking to CurseForge. It also has a moderation queue which can delay mod uploads, and mods uploaded to Curse are subject to the KSP addon posting rules.

Majiir

I am offering free, no-advertisements, no-strings-attached hosting for mods. Right now there is no website for mods I host, but you can create one of your own if you like. Get in touch with me in this thread, on IRC or by email (majiir-[at]-majiir-dot-net) if you're interested. I also operate KerbalStuff, but you may be interested in individual hosting if you have a domain name you'd like to use, or if you're hosting very large files.

Self-hosting

If you have your own web hosting service, you can self-host - but this can be expensive, particularly if your mod becomes popular. Hosting on a personal computer often provides a poor experience for users, so I recommend you stay away from this option unless you have the resources to support it.

What about Kerbal Spaceport?

Spaceport was shut down May 30, 2014.

Help me improve this guide.

If you have any information to contribute to this guide, please post your thoughts. As usual, moderators, feel free to make edits to improve this post.

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Just going to go ahead and say it now. I will not use curse to download any mod and QUITE a few others have stated the same thing. I encourage modders to stay away from that place and instead consider the other options to host their mod.

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Didn't know they were taking down SpacePort.

I have split feelings about Curse. I'd like modders to receive some kind of payback for their work, but I don't want to go through five surveys and unskippable ads just to download a mod. Just use mediafire/dropbox and maje a donation link.

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Ugh, can we leave the Curse discussion to where it belongs? http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/79011-The-Curse-Thread

My statement was to those who make the mods. If you want to use curse that is your choice. However, unless you have other means to download your mod I will simply not use them. It is regrettable but far superior to using curse.

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  • 3 months later...
  • 2 weeks later...

I've been out of commission, KSP-wise, for a few weeks now. Apparently, on August 21, there was a rule change with respect to mod hosting and download links? A lot of forum posts have had their download links manually scrubbed by forum moderators due to compliance issues? Something about an actual real-life law change? Does anyone have any info on this?

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  • 10 months later...

As a non coder myself I still prefer github or bitbucket. It has a built in way of bug reporting which is good if you made a mod that you would like feedback or bug reporting on. Its good if your mod is a collaborative project with many people contributing to the mod. Just my 2 cents

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Thanks for the information about publishing.  I have two followup questions.

 

I am trying to publish a mod that increases the burnup temperature of the thermometer, so that it can be used as a temperature gauge for parts it is stuck onto (1 line of code for module manager).  After reading this I'll probably put it on gitHub.  I'd also like to add it to CKAN, and publish it in these forums.

1) the forum requires a license now, right?  Is there some boiler-plate license somewhere?

2) Is there a 30 second guide to CKAN publishing?

 

Thanks again

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 10/28/2016 at 2:12 PM, dunebugmi said:

1) the forum requires a license now, right?  Is there some boiler-plate license somewhere?

2) Is there a 30 second guide to CKAN publishing?

1

1) http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/41210-license-selection-guide/

2) https://github.com/KSP-CKAN/CKAN/wiki/Adding-a-mod-to-the-CKAN

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