documentation/panel/getting_started.md

Getting Started

Pterodactyl Panel is designed to run on your own web server. You will need to have root access to your server in order to run and use this panel.

You are expected to understand how to read documentation to use this Panel. We have spent many hours detailing how to install or upgrade our software; take some time and read rather than copy and pasting and then complaining when things do not work. This panel does not exist as a drag-and-drop service to run your servers. It is a highly complex system requiring multiple dependencies and administrators willing to spend some time learning how to use it. If you expect to be able to install this with no understanding of basic linux system administration you should stop and turn around now.

Picking a Server OS

Pterodactyl runs on a wide range of operating systems, so pick whichever you are most comfortable using.

::: warning Pterodactyl does not support most OpenVZ systems due to incompatabilities with Docker. If you are planning on running this software on an OpenVZ based system you will not be successful. :::

Operating System	Version	Supported	Notes
Ubuntu	14.04	⚠️	Documentation assumes changes to systemd introduced in 16.04
	16.04	✅	Recommended.
	18.04	✅
CentOS	6	🚫	Does not support all of the required packages.
	7	✅
Debian	8	✅
	9	✅

Dependencies

• PHP 7.2 with the following extensions: cli, openssl, gd, mysql, PDO, mbstring, tokenizer, bcmath, xml or dom, curl, zip
• MySQL 5.7 or higher or MariaDB 10.1.3 or higher
• Redis (redis-server)
• A webserver (Apache, NGINX, Caddy, etc.)
• curl
• tar
• unzip
• git

Example Dependency Installation

The commands below are simply an example of how you might install these dependencies. Please consult with your operating system's package manager to determine the correct packages to install.

# Add "add-apt-repository" command
apt -y install software-properties-common

# Add additional repositories for PHP, Redis, and MariaDB
add-apt-repository -y ppa:ondrej/php
add-apt-repository -y ppa:chris-lea/redis-server
curl -sS https://downloads.mariadb.com/MariaDB/mariadb_repo_setup | sudo bash

# Update repositories list
apt update

# Install Dependencies
apt -y install php7.2 php7.2-cli php7.2-gd php7.2-mysql php7.2-pdo php7.2-mbstring php7.2-tokenizer php7.2-bcmath php7.2-xml php7.2-fpm php7.2-curl php7.2-zip mariadb-server nginx curl tar unzip git redis-server

Download Files

The first step in this process is to create the folder where the panel will live and then move ourselves into that newly created folder. Below is an example of how to perform this operation.

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

Once you have created a new directory for the Panel and moved into it you'll need to download the Panel files. This is as simple as using curl to download our pre-packaged content. Once it is downloaded you'll need to unpack the archive and then set the correct permissions on the storage/ and bootstrap/cache/ directories. These directories allow us to store files as well as keep a speedy cache available to reduce load times.

curl -Lo panel.tar.gz https://github.com/pterodactyl/panel/releases/download/v0.7.6/panel.tar.gz
tar --strip-components=1 -xzvf panel.tar.gz
chmod -R 755 storage/* bootstrap/cache/