I, like many others, like to play computer games, and some games are just more enjoyable with friends. Self-hosting a game server can sometimes be a real pain in the butt since it usually involves port forwarding. Paying for a 3rd party to host it for you also wasn't really in my interest since I had a spare computer that I wanted to use as a server.
After spending about 2 minutes Googling for game server control panels, I found a really cool project named Pterodactyl. A simple to use but very powerful and feature-rich panel.
Pterodactyl offers a plethora of useful features such as:
- Resource monitoring
- Console input/output
- Database management
- File management
- Schedules
- Backups
- Sub-users ...
Even though the standard version doesn't by any means lack any features, some people might still want a little extra, which is why Apollo panel was made. Its based on the original Pterodactyl panel, but adds a lot of extra features such as:
- Automatic server importing
- Game version changer
- Subdomain management
- Modpack installer
- Audit logs ...
Here's how the new panel looks:
Sadly this is a private fork, therefore I can't link you to its source code, but if you want to give it a go, feel free to visit Sparked Host and ask for a trial server.
That being said, I wasn't the only person working on this panel and have to give some credit to my team at Sparked Host for helping with its development. If we dig a little deeper into its technical aspects, it's based on Laravel framework as well as React.
Panel's main goal is to orchestrate Docker containers across multiple physical servers, but the custom developed one has a number of enhancements such as S3 object storage support, integration with PowerDNS, billing portal single-sign-on, and a couple others.