Installing Wings

Introduction

Wings is the server control plane for Pterodactyl. It runs on each of your nodes, manages Docker, and runs your game servers. The Panel talks to Wings to start, stop, and manage those servers.

Pterodactyl 2.0 uses the same Wings as 1.x. Wings 1.13.2 and 1.13.3 have been tested with the 2.0 Panel.

Supported Systems

Wings supports these versions of Ubuntu:

Other Linux distributions may work, but they often need changes to these steps, and we cannot help with those installations. Wings does not run on Windows.

System Requirements

Wings needs a Linux system that can run Docker containers. Most virtual private servers and nearly all dedicated servers can.

If your provider uses Virtuozzo, OpenVZ, or LXC virtualization, you probably cannot run Wings. Some providers have changed their setup to support Docker, so ask their support team. KVM always works.

To check which virtualization your server uses, run:

systemd-detect-virt

If the result is not openvz or lxc, Wings should work. A result of none means your server is not virtualized.

Dependencies

Wings needs curl and Docker.

Installing Docker

To install Docker quickly, run Docker's install script:

curl -sSL https://get.docker.com/ | CHANNEL=stable bash

If you would rather install Docker by hand, follow the official Docker documentation.

Start Docker on Boot

On systems that use systemd, run this command so that Docker starts when the machine boots:

sudo systemctl enable --now docker

Enabling Swap

Linux kernel 6.1 and newer enable swap accounting by default. To check your kernel version, run uname -r. If it is 6.1 or newer, you may skip this step.

On older kernels, Docker usually cannot limit swap. Run docker info and look for WARNING: No swap limit support near the end. Enabling swap is optional, but we recommend it if you host servers for other people, because it helps prevent out-of-memory errors.

To enable it, open /etc/default/grub as root and find the line that starts with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. Add swapaccount=1 inside the quotes, keeping anything that is already there:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="swapaccount=1"

Then run sudo update-grub and restart the machine with sudo reboot. Some distributions ignore GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. If the change has no effect, add the option to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX instead.

Installing Wings

Create the configuration directory, then download the Wings binary for your CPU:

sudo mkdir -p /etc/pterodactyl
curl -L -o /usr/local/bin/wings "https://github.com/pterodactyl/wings/releases/latest/download/wings_linux_$([[ "$(uname -m)" == "x86_64" ]] && echo "amd64" || echo "arm64")"
sudo chmod u+x /usr/local/bin/wings

Configuring Wings

Next, create a node in the Panel and give its configuration to Wings.

1. In the Panel, open Admin → Nodes and click New node.
2. Fill in the node's details, then save it.
3. Open the node and select the Configuration tab.

The tab shows the node's configuration file. You may configure Wings in either of two ways.

Using the Auto-Deploy Command

Click Generate Token under Auto-Deploy. The Panel shows a command like this:

cd /etc/pterodactyl && sudo wings configure --panel-url https://panel.example.com --token ptla_... --node 1

Run it on the node. It downloads the configuration from the Panel and saves it to /etc/pterodactyl/config.yml. If the file already exists, add --override to replace it.

Copying the Configuration File

Alternatively, copy the configuration file from the Configuration tab into /etc/pterodactyl/config.yml on the node. Check that its remote value is your Panel's address. The tab fills it in from the address you opened the Panel with.

Starting Wings

To make sure Wings works, start it in debug mode:

sudo wings --debug

The first start may take a few minutes while Wings sets up Docker. Once it runs without errors, stop it with CTRL+C, and run it as a service as described below.

Running Wings as a Service

To run Wings in the background, create a file named wings.service in /etc/systemd/system with these contents:

[Unit]
Description=Pterodactyl Wings Daemon
After=docker.service
Requires=docker.service
PartOf=docker.service

[Service]
User=root
WorkingDirectory=/etc/pterodactyl
LimitNOFILE=4096
PIDFile=/var/run/wings/daemon.pid
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/wings
Restart=on-failure
StartLimitInterval=180
StartLimitBurst=30
RestartSec=5s

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then enable and start it:

sudo systemctl enable --now wings

Adding Allocations

An allocation is an IP address and port that you can assign to a server. Every server needs at least one. To add allocations, open the node in Admin → Nodes and select the Allocation tab.

Use the IP address of the node's network interface. Behind NAT, use the internal IP address. To find it, run:

hostname -I | awk '{print $1}'

Do not use 127.0.0.1 for allocations that players connect to. It is only for servers that should be reachable from other servers on the node, such as the backend servers of a Minecraft proxy network.