Installation and configuration of the Pterodactyl panel

After ordering and activating the server, a letter with information about the order will be sent to your email, which will contain information for connecting to the server via SSH. The Pterodactyl panel is a free product, installation is supported on Linux operating systems. Below is information about supported operating systems and the required set of software.

To start the installation, you need to connect to the server via SSH, because most actions are performed in console mode. Please note that the installation process assumes that you have at least a minimal understanding of how Linux systems and the above software work. The following will be a list of commands and necessary actions to install the Pterodactyl game server control panel.

Before you continue with the installation process, you need to install Composer, a dependency manager for PHP.

Then you need to create a directory in which the panel will be located and move to this directory.

Once you have created a new directory for the panel and moved into it, you will need to download the panel files. After downloading, you need to unpack the archive, then set the correct permissions for the storage/ and bootstrap/cache/ directories. These directories allow you to store files and also provide a fast cache to reduce loading times.

The next step is to create a database and a user, with the appropriate permissions for that database.

Copy the default environment settings file, install the core dependencies, and then generate a new application encryption key.

The next step is to configure features such as sessions, caching, database credentials, and email sending.

Now you need to configure all the basic data for the panel in the database created earlier. The command below may take some time to complete, please do not terminate the process until it is completed.

Then you need to create a user with administrator rights so that you can log into the panel. To do this, run the below command.

The last step in the installation process is to set the correct permissions for the panel files so that the web server can use them correctly.

Next, you need to add a Crontab job, running every minute, to handle certain Pterodactyl tasks, such as session cleanup and sending scheduled tasks to daemons. You'll want to open your crontab with sudo crontab -e and then paste the line below.

Create a new systemd worker to have the queue process run in the background. This queue is responsible for sending emails and performing many other background tasks for Pterodactyl. Create a file called pteroq.service in /etc/systemd/system with the following content.

Enable the redis-server and pteroq.service services, and also configure them to autoload when the server OS boots.

Let's look at setting up using NGINX as a web server. First remove the default NGINX configuration.

Create a file called pterodactyl.conf in the /etc/nginx/sites-available/ directory and paste the following contents (replace with your domain name or server IP address).

File contents for NGINX without SSL

File contents for NGINX with SSL

Enable NGINX configuration and restart it

Wings is the next generation server control panel from Pterodactyl. To run Wings, you will need to install Docker on the server. To quickly install Docker CE, you can run the below command.

Run the command below to make Docker start when your server boots.

On most systems, Docker will not be able to configure swap space by default. Enabling paging is completely optional, but we recommend doing so to prevent OOM errors.
To enable swap, open /etc/default/grub as root and look for the line starting with GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT. Make sure the line contains swapaccount=1.

After this, run the grub update, then reboot the server and enable swap.

To install Wings, run the commands below, which will create a base directory and download the wings executable.

After installing Wings and the necessary components, the next step is to create a node on the installed panel. Go to the administrative view of the panel, select Nodes in the sidebar and click the Create New button on the right.

The system will prompt you to create a Location. When adding a location, you can specify a custom name.

After adding a location, you can return to creating a node. Fill in the valid parameters and complete node creation. Then click on the created node and open the Configuration tab. You need to copy the configuration code and place it in the config.yml file, which must be created in the /etc/pterodactyl/ directory.

To launch Wings, run the command below in the console. Once you are sure that the program runs without errors, use CTRL+C to terminate the process.

If Wings launched without errors, you can run it in the background. To do this, create a file named wings.service in the /etc/systemd/system/ directory with the following contents.

Then run the command below to restart systemd and start Wings.

Let's look at creating a game server in Pterodactyl, using Minecraft as an example. First, you need to add Allocation to the node properties, specify the IP address and port that will be used by the game server. Then go to the Servers section and add a new server with the necessary parameters, the screenshots show an example of adding a server.

Wait until the installation of the game server is completed, after which it will be displayed in the list of servers with the status Active.

When you click on the name of the created server, its menu will open, with options for setting up and configuring the server. To start the server, you need to click on the button in the form of a key.

The game server is started by pressing the Start button, you need to wait until the loading is completed (the message "Server marked as running" will appear in the server window) and after that you can connect to the server through the game client on Your computer.
This completes the installation and basic configuration of the Pterodactyl game server control panel. You can create game servers and manage them in the panel interface.