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Getting Started

This 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. 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.

Supported OSeS

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

Reviactyl does not support most OpenVZ systems due to incompatibilities with Docker. If you are planning on running this software on an OpenVZ based system you will — most likely — not be successful.

Operating System
Status
Notes

Ubuntu 22.04

Fully Supported

Requires additional repositories for PHP

Ubuntu 24.04

Fully Supported

MariaDB can be installed without the repo setup script.

Debian 11

Fully Supported

Reviactyl is tested primarily on Debian. This is our preferred choice of OS

Debian 12

Fully Supported

Reviactyl is tested primarily on Debian. This is our preferred choice of OS

RHEL / Rocky Linux / AlmaLinux

Fully Supported

Extra repos are required.

Dependencies

  • PHP 8.2 or 8.3 (recommended) with the following extensions: cli, openssl, gd, mysql, PDO, mbstring, tokenizer, bcmath, xml or dom, curl, zip, and fpm if you are planning to use NGINX.

  • MySQL 5.7.22 and higher (MySQL 8 recommended) or MariaDB 10.2 and higher.

  • Redis (redis-server)

  • A webserver (Apache, NGINX, Caddy, etc.)

  • curl

  • tar

  • unzip

  • git

  • composer v2

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 curl apt-transport-https ca-certificates gnupg

# Add additional repositories for PHP (Ubuntu 22.04)
LC_ALL=C.UTF-8 add-apt-repository -y ppa:ondrej/php

# Add Redis official APT repository
curl -fsSL https://packages.redis.io/gpg | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/redis-archive-keyring.gpg
echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/redis-archive-keyring.gpg] https://packages.redis.io/deb $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/redis.list

# Update repositories list
apt update

# Install Dependencies
apt -y install php8.3 php8.3-{common,cli,gd,mysql,mbstring,bcmath,xml,fpm,curl,zip} mariadb-server nginx tar unzip git redis-server

Installing Composer

Composer is a dependency manager for PHP that allows us to ship everything you'll need code wise to operate the Panel. You'll need composer installed before continuing in this process.

curl -sS https://getcomposer.org/installer | sudo php -- --install-dir=/usr/local/bin --filename=composer

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/reviactyl
cd /var/www/reviactyl

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/reviactyl/panel/releases/latest/download/panel.tar.gz
tar -xzvf panel.tar.gz
chmod -R 755 storage/* bootstrap/cache/

Installation

Now that all of the files have been downloaded we need to configure some core aspects of the Panel.

Database Configuration

You will need a database setup and a user with the correct permissions created for that database before continuing any further. See below to create a user and database for your Pterodactyl panel quickly.

# If using MariaDB (v11.0.0+) (This is the default when installing Pterodactyl by following the documentation.)
mariadb -u root -p

# If using MySQL
mysql -u root -p
# Kindly use a secure password. Generate one at https://www.avast.com/random-password-generator
CREATE USER 'pterodactyl'@'127.0.0.1' IDENTIFIED BY 'yourPassword';
CREATE DATABASE panel;
GRANT ALL PRIVILEGES ON panel.* TO 'pterodactyl'@'127.0.0.1' WITH GRANT OPTION;
exit

First we will copy over our default environment settings file, install core dependencies, and then generate a new application encryption key.

cp .env.example .env
COMPOSER_ALLOW_SUPERUSER=1 composer install --no-dev --optimize-autoloader

# Only run the command below if you are installing this Panel for
# the first time and do not have any Reviactyl Panel data in the database.
php artisan key:generate --force

Back up your encryption key (APP_KEY in the .env file). It is used as an encryption key for all data that needs to be stored securely (e.g. API keys). Store it somewhere safe - not just on your server. If you lose it, all encrypted data is irrecoverable, even with database backups.

To grab your APP_KEY, open a terminal and run the following in your panel directory:

grep APP_KEY /var/www/reviactyl/.env

You should see something like:

APP_KEY=base64:YOUR_LONG_RANDOM_STRING

Copy that entire line and save it somewhere secure:

  • A password manager

  • An encrypted file on your local machine

  • A secure USB drive

  • A trusted cloud vault

Do not keep it only on the server. If you lose this key, your encrypted data is permanently unrecoverable.

Environment Configuration

Pterodactyl's core environment is easily configured using a few different CLI commands built into the app. This step will cover setting up things such as sessions, caching, database credentials, and email sending.

php artisan p:environment:setup
php artisan p:environment:database

# To use PHP's internal mail sending (not recommended), select "mail". To use a
# custom SMTP server, select "smtp".
php artisan p:environment:mail

Database Setup

Now we need to setup all of the base data for the Panel in the database you created earlier. The command below may take some time to run depending on your machine. Please DO NOT exit the process until it is completed! This command will setup the database tables and then add all of the Nests & Eggs that power Pterodactyl.

php artisan migrate --seed --force

Create your First User

You'll then need to create an administrative user so that you can log into the panel. To do so, run the command below. At this time passwords must meet the following requirements: 8 characters, mixed case, at least one number.

php artisan p:user:make

Set Permissions

The last step in the installation process is to set the correct permissions on the Panel files so that the webserver can use them correctly.

# If using NGINX, Apache or Caddy (not on RHEL / Rocky Linux / AlmaLinux)
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/reviactyl/*

# If using NGINX on RHEL / Rocky Linux / AlmaLinux
chown -R nginx:nginx /var/www/reviactyl/*

# If using Apache on RHEL / Rocky Linux / AlmaLinux
chown -R apache:apache /var/www/reviactyl/*

Queue Listeners

We make use of queues to make the application faster and handle sending emails and other actions in the background. You will need to setup the queue worker for these actions to be processed.

Crontab Configuration

The first thing we need to do is create a new cronjob that runs every minute to process specific Pterodactyl tasks, such as session cleanup and sending scheduled tasks to daemons. You'll want to open your crontab using sudo crontab -e and then paste the line below.

* * * * * php /var/www/reviactyl/artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

Create Queue Worker

Next you need to create a new systemd worker to keep our queue process running in the background. This queue is responsible for sending emails and handling many other background tasks for Reviactyl.

Create a file called reviq.service in /etc/systemd/system with the contents below.

# Reviactyl Queue Worker File
# ----------------------------------

[Unit]
Description=Reviactyl Queue Worker
After=redis-server.service

[Service]
# On some systems the user and group might be different.
# Some systems use `apache` or `nginx` as the user and group.
User=www-data
Group=www-data
Restart=always
ExecStart=/usr/bin/php /var/www/reviactyl/artisan queue:work --queue=high,standard,low --sleep=3 --tries=3
StartLimitInterval=180
StartLimitBurst=30
RestartSec=5s

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

If you are using RHEL, Rocky Linux, or AlmaLinux, you will need to replace redis-server.service with redis.service at the After= line in order to ensure redis starts before the queue worker.

If you are not using redis for anything you should remove the After= line, otherwise you will encounter errors when the service starts.

If you are using redis for your system, you will want to make sure to enable that it will start on boot. You can do that by running the following command:

sudo systemctl enable --now redis-server

Finally, enable the service and set it to boot on machine start.

sudo systemctl enable --now reviq.service
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