Heyo!
Sorry for being a little late to this announcement. We've created our own fork of Pterodactyl called FoxPanel. It's an intuitive control panel for game & application servers.
This post aims to take a deep dive into the panel to show what sets us apart from our competitors, and how we innovated the experience for our clients.
Under the Hood
Before we look at the pretty new UI, let's talk about stability. If you've been here a while, you know the old panel on a single VPS was kinda praying on my downfall. We moved from a single panel instance with like no backups to a highly resilient, instance-based deployment thing. The panel's databases, its environment secrets (the panel's actual secrets, not the client ones), and the actual thing that says the panel instance should exist are on different machines now, with multiple multiple backups, on-site and in the cloud. Basically, if things go wrong, your stuff is safe.
CUSTOMIZATIIIOOOONN
Nothing I set for the theme is gonna match everyone's tastebuds, so I've taken it upon myself to create a personalization tab in your account page where you can customize almost anything about your FoxPanel.
You can change things like colors, custom dashboard backgrounds, overlay darkness, UI density, and so much more. The main dashboard also lets you organize your servers into color-coded folders. Streamers, we got you too. We added a Privacy Mode toggle that blurs server IPs and hostnames across the dashboard so you don't leak your stuff on stream. I encourage you to explore this big update and post how pretty you can make it look in the Discord :3
Smarter Minecraft Management
I want to make running your server as effortless as possible. Our panel now auto detects your mc version from the jar and autofills it in the plugins page. We also autodetect installed plugins! (Right now they don't map to plugins in the built-in Modrinth search menu, and the GUI plugin config is broken rn, but that's a soon thing).
Someone also asked for us to add a GUI for the server properties thing, and we've had this for a while now, it's in here. Instead of digging through text files, it's just simple toggle switches for things like Allow Flight, Command Blocks, and PvP.
Slide-Out Console
You can open the console on the right of the screen so you can see what's going on and run commands while you're in other pages, such as a plugin config. You can pause the console to prevent it from reaching the max entries thing where it deletes old log lines if there's a lot of things going on and you wanna see a specific line for an extended period of time. You can also clear it or send it straight to https://mclo.gs/ to share it with others.
Macros
you can create custom macros in the panel in the settings tab. if you wanna quickly ban a player named jeff who somehow keeps finding their way back into the server, you can create a shortcut command called jeffinate that runs ban jeff or something idk.
we're also thinking about making a permission thing where the users in that group can only run specific macros and not have write console access and only access to macros. Like, 5 modes. 1: no console R/W. 2: Console R. 3: Console R & Macros. 4: Console R/W. 5: Console R/W & Macros.
Schedules
You can set custom conditions for schedules that have to be met for a schedule to run, like player counts, a file existing, resource usage, blah.
I also added a "Simple Interval Mode". Basically, instead of making you learn how to write complicated cron syntax to make something run every 5 minutes or whatever, you just toggle a switch and pick the time visually.
You can also easily set them to only run on weekdays or during business hours.
User Groups
Copying permissions between users is annoying, so we built User Groups. You can make a group (like "Auditor" or "Full Admin") that only has access to specific folders and files, make some files read-only, and add multiple users to that group so you don't have to copy permissions between users. Try it out!
In the permissions editor, the visual cues are super simple: Blue checkmark means inherited access. Green checkmark means explicit access. X means explicitly denied. yellow RO on the right means it's read only. The audit log lets you see who did what, down to the file reads and console commands.
We know that the UX isn't all there right now, so this will change in one of the upcoming panel updates.
Everything Else
Subdomains
This has been the biggest request we've been getting since we started. We've never had a self-serve tool for subdomains before because the tools we had for creating/adding domains and subdomains was very clunky and stuff, but after creating a very intuitive and secure API for the tool (I had to rebuild everything around the core part of it , I had to mix python and node.js to avoid re-writing ALL of it), I was able to rework the subdomain module that came with the theme to use the API and subdomains are now available for y'all to use. You can link them right to your port allocations and set specific routing (even an eagler special :3).
Billing Integration
we just a little thingy to the sidebar in the server pages. It tells you your active server plan and your next renewal date with a little days countdown.
um anyways, thank you for choosing Hosting Haven!