This is Part 9 of the Game Configuration series. Console triggers let GameCP watch the game server's output and react automatically when specific patterns appear.

What Are Console Triggers?

When a game server runs, it writes output to the console — log messages, player join/leave events, errors, and status updates. Console triggers monitor this output stream and execute actions when a matching pattern is detected.

Common use cases:

Detect when a server is ready — trigger a "server started" event when the game prints "Done! For help, type help"
Log player activity — capture join/leave messages
Auto-restart on crash — detect fatal error messages and restart the server
Send notifications — alert admins when specific events occur

Creating a Trigger

Click Add Trigger to create a new console trigger. Each trigger has:

Property	Description
Name	A human-readable label (e.g., "Server Ready Detector")
Pattern	The text pattern to match in console output
Action	What to do when the pattern is matched
Enabled	Toggle on/off without deleting

Pattern Matching

Patterns can be:

Plain text — matches if the console output contains the exact string
Regex — use regular expressions for complex matching

Important: stdout and stderr

GameCP monitors both stdout and stderr output streams. This means triggers will fire regardless of which stream the game writes to — important for games like Hytale that write prompts to stderr.

Actions

When a trigger fires, it can perform actions like marking the server as "started" or running a command. The exact actions available depend on the trigger configuration and the game server's current state.

Tips

The most common trigger is the "server ready" detector — without it, GameCP relies on query responses to determine if the server is online
Keep patterns specific enough to avoid false positives
Test your patterns by starting a server and watching the console output
Triggers fire in the order they appear in the list