Getting Started

Introduction

This guide installs the Panel on a Linux server where you have root access. You should be comfortable installing packages, editing files, and managing services.

To upgrade a 1.x Panel, follow Upgrading From 1.x.

Choosing an Operating System

Supported operating systems:

Pterodactyl officially supports Ubuntu, Debian, and the Panel's Docker image. Other Linux distributions may work, but often need changes to these steps, and we cannot help with them.

Pick your operating system, PHP version, and web server. The commands on this page follow your choices.

Installing Dependencies

The Panel needs:

• PHP 8.3 or 8.4, with the cli, gd, mysql, mbstring, bcmath, xml, curl, zip, and intl extensions. NGINX and Caddy also need PHP-FPM.
• MariaDB 10.11 or 11, or MySQL 8 or 9.
• Redis.
• A web server, such as NGINX, Apache, or Caddy.
• curl, tar, and unzip.
• Composer 2.

Install everything:

apt update
apt -y install php8.3 php8.3-{common,cli,gd,mysql,mbstring,bcmath,xml,fpm,curl,zip,intl} mariadb-server redis-server tar unzip curl nginx

Installing Composer

Install Composer, the PHP dependency manager:

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer

Downloading the Panel

Create the Panel's directory and move into it:

mkdir -p /var/www/pterodactyl
cd /var/www/pterodactyl

Download the latest beta, unpack it, and make storage and bootstrap/cache writable:

curl -Lo panel.tar.gz https://github.com/pterodactyl/panel/releases/download/v2.0.0-beta.2/panel.tar.gz
tar -xzvf panel.tar.gz
chmod -R 755 storage/* bootstrap/cache/

Creating the Database

The Panel needs its own database and a user with access to it. Open the MariaDB console:

mariadb -u root

Create the user and database. Replace yourPassword with a strong, unique password:

CREATE USER 'pterodactyl'@'127.0.0.1' IDENTIFIED BY 'yourPassword';
CREATE DATABASE panel;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON panel.* TO 'pterodactyl'@'127.0.0.1' WITH GRANT OPTION;
exit

Installation

Installing PHP Dependencies

Copy the example environment file, install PHP dependencies, and generate the application key:

cp .env.example .env
COMPOSER_ALLOW_SUPERUSER=1 composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader
php artisan key:generate --force

Only run php artisan key:generate on a new installation. On an existing Panel, it makes encrypted data unreadable.

grep APP_KEY /var/www/pterodactyl/.env

Configuring the Environment

These commands set up the environment. They ask about your Panel's address, sessions, caching, the database, and email:

php artisan p:environment:setup
php artisan p:environment:database
php artisan p:environment:mail

In p:environment:setup, choose Redis for the cache, session, and queue drivers. For email, choose smtp to use your own mail server. The mail option uses PHP's built-in mail sending, which is not recommended.

Setting Up the Database

Create the database tables and add the default eggs:

php artisan migrate --seed --force

This may take a while. Do not stop it before it finishes.

Creating the First User

Create an administrator account to sign in with:

php artisan p:user:make

Setting Permissions

Give the web server user ownership of the Panel's files:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/pterodactyl/*

Queue and Scheduler

The Panel sends email, runs server schedules, and does other background work through a scheduler and a queue worker.

Scheduler

Open root's crontab:

crontab -e

Add this line to run the scheduler every minute:

* * * * * php /var/www/pterodactyl/artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

Queue Worker

Create pteroq.service in /etc/systemd/system:

[Unit]
Description=Pterodactyl Queue Worker
After=redis-server.service

[Service]
User=www-data
Group=www-data
Restart=always
ExecStart=/usr/bin/php /var/www/pterodactyl/artisan queue:work --queue=high,standard,low --sleep=3 --tries=3
StartLimitInterval=180
StartLimitBurst=30
RestartSec=5s

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Enable Redis and the queue worker so they start on boot:

systemctl enable --now redis-server
systemctl enable --now pteroq.service

Next Steps

Next, configure your web server to open the Panel in your browser. Then install Wings on each node.

Telemetry

The Panel sends anonymous usage statistics to help improve Pterodactyl. p:environment:setup asks whether to enable it. See Telemetry for what is collected and how to turn it off.