Pterodactyl

Stop settling for less. Make game servers a first class citizen on your platform.

Pterodactyl® is a free, open-source game server management panel built with PHP, React, and Go. Every game server runs inside an isolated Docker container, keeping your host environment clean and capping resource usage per server. Pterodactyl has been in active development since 2015 and powers game server hosting for individual users, networks, and large hosting enterprises alike. It is MIT-licensed and completely free.

Supported Games

Pterodactyl ships with official support for a wide range of games, including:

• Minecraft (Java, Bedrock, and variants)
• Rust, Terraria, ARK: Survival Evolved
• Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive
• Factorio, Squad, and many more via community eggs

After Deployment

Once the panel is up, visit your domain and run the following command inside the Pterodactyl container to create your first admin account:

php artisan p:user:make

Then head to Admin → Nodes and connect a Wings node — Wings is the Go-based daemon that actually runs and manages your game server containers on a host machine.

Important: Back up the APP_KEY value from your container's /app/.env immediately after setup. Losing it makes encrypted data (such as API keys) unrecoverable.

What This Template Deploys

Service	Role
Pterodactyl Panel	Web UI & API
MariaDB	Relational database
Redis	Cache, sessions, and job queue

Links

• Website: https://pterodactyl.io/
• Documentation: https://pterodactyl.io/panel/1.0/getting_started.html
• GitHub (Panel): https://github.com/pterodactyl/panel
• GitHub (Wings): https://github.com/pterodactyl/wings