panel

Pterodactyl is a free, open-source control panel for hosting and managing game servers. If you run a Minecraft server, a Rust server, or any of dozens of other supported games, Pterodactyl gives you a web interface to start, stop, configure, and monitor those servers without logging into a terminal every time.

The panel isolates each game server inside its own Docker container. A Docker container is a self-contained environment that keeps the game server separate from everything else on the machine, so one server can't interfere with another and the host system stays clean. This also means you can run many different game types on one machine without worrying about conflicting software.

The web interface is built with PHP and React, and the backend daemon that actually manages the containers is written in Go. There is a companion component called Wings that runs on each host machine and handles the actual container operations. The panel talks to Wings over the network, so you can manage servers spread across multiple machines from one central dashboard.

Supported games include Minecraft (with Paper, Sponge, BungeeCord, and Waterfall variants), Rust, Terraria, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Garry's Mod, ARK: Survival Evolved, and many others. The community has built additional game configurations called "eggs" that extend support further. A companion project called Blueprint provides a package manager for installing add-ons and themes.

Pterodactyl is released under the MIT license and has documentation covering installation of both the panel and the Wings daemon.