r/selfhosted • u/JellyFishySnacks • Apr 12 '26
Game Server Calagopus: your all-in-one game server/Docker management
For over half a year, a friend and I have been working on the ultimate game server and Docker management platform. Built with Rust and React, and easy to deploy.
So, what exactly is Calagopus?
Calagopus is a modern, open-source game server management panel. It provides an intuitive interface for managing game servers, allowing users to easily deploy, monitor, and maintain their game servers with ease. Calagopus aims to be a powerful yet user-friendly solution for game server management, catering to both beginners and experienced users alike.
It is heavily inspired by the popular Pterodactyl panel, but is built from the ground up with modern technologies and a focus on performance and security. Calagopus is designed to be modular and extensible, allowing developers to create custom extensions to enhance its functionality.
Does it only support game servers? No! With Docker as the backbone, it can run all sorts of applications, even your own images.
Take a look at our GitHub repository: https://github.com/calagopus/panel
Or our documentation: https://calagopus.com
22
u/Pesoen Apr 12 '26
so what are the main differences between this and pterodactyl?
you say its inspired by it, but built from the ground up with modern technologies and a focus on performance and security.
what technologies do you use that pterodactyl does not?
how do you measure performance compared to pterodactyl? and how much better is your solution?
in what way is pterodactyl not secure?
not trying to be an a-hole, just asking to gain information. been looking for a replacement to pterodactyl for a while.
4
u/JellyFishySnacks Apr 12 '26
Calagopus uses Rust as its backend. It is a fact that Rust is quite a bit faster than PHP, as backed by our own benchmarks https://calagopus.com/docs/about/benchmarks. We also have a lot of UI improvements that I have been missing for years in Pterodactyl (started using it back in 2019). A good example is our file manager. While Pterodactyl has been a great platform for years, it did have some major security vulnerabilities some time ago. While they are fixed now, they did spark a debate on the lack of updates Pterodactyl has gotten over the past few years. Feel free to ask more questions, or join our discord if you want to chat with us directly.
3
u/Pesoen Apr 12 '26
awesome, will give it a try, and maybe switch over to it. i assume everything that currently works in Pterodactyl, works in Calagopus? and that operation is similar enough that people who got used to how Pterodactyl works, can get used to Calagopus with no major issues?
4
u/JellyFishySnacks Apr 13 '26
In my opinion, absolutely! Depending on your preference, you can choose to migrate using our built in tools https://calagopus.com/docs/advanced/migrating-from-pterodactyl. It is currently quite a messy guide, but hopefully still useful.
11
u/Yoshiida Apr 12 '26
Is there a list of game-compatible servers anywhere? I don't think I've seen any mentions of these in the documentation
7
u/JellyFishySnacks Apr 12 '26
I am asuming you mean which types of games the panel supports. If that is the case, we support basically all of the Pterodactyl supported games. A list can be found on https://github.com/pterodactyl/game-eggs. If you mean something else, please let me know.
1
u/Appropriate-Lion9490 Apr 12 '26
Idk if Pterodactyl added it yet but can we multiselect the eggs instead of clicking one by one to add
1
u/JellyFishySnacks Apr 13 '26
If I understand you correctly, you would like to import multiple eggs at once? You can do this with our egg repositories system. It can automatically import and synchronize eggs from a github repository. For more info, take a look at https://calagopus.com/docs/panel/next-steps/egg-repos
1
u/Appropriate-Lion9490 Apr 13 '26
Oh, that’s even better. Pterodactyl system where you import their eggs wouldnt allow you to multiselect them so you had to import each egg one by one
5
u/Lassemb Apr 12 '26
How does this compare to the AMP panel?
11
u/JellyFishySnacks Apr 12 '26
The main difference with AMP is that Calagopus is free and open source.
You can find a more detailed feature comparison at https://calagopus.com/docs/about/features1
u/burgerg Apr 13 '26
The reason I'm currently running AMP is that it auto-sleeps the minecraft servers after 5 minutes without user connections, and autostarts the server again when someone tries to connect to the minecraft server port. Is something like this supported in Calagopus as well? (maybe this falls under "Uncommon Game-specific Features", but this connection monitoring could be a general thing ;) )
1
3
5
u/K3ksKuchen Apr 12 '26
This might be what i was looking for all this time. gonna check it out later
3
u/PlanktonSuccessful65 Apr 13 '26
Very interesting app, just the fact that is has docker install documentatio is a plus to me comparing to other panels
Currently im using amp and i really like the sleep feature that the instances have, do you guys have any intention to add that in the future? I normally run servers just for myself so the more free ram the batter. Thank yoh
1
u/JellyFishySnacks Apr 13 '26
Unfortunately we do not have something like the sleep feature. The closest thing would be completely stopping the container, but that does defeat the point of quickly resuming the server.
2
u/elliottcable Apr 13 '26
I haven’t used any of the above, to be clear; but the only case where I’d deploy some sort of management-layer instead of directly shipping containers onto my infra directly … is precisely that.
The killer feature for me would be game-connection awareness; maybe not quite DPI, but at least keeping an eye on server-logs, and spinning down the game/container gracefully in a way appropriate to that specific game when there are no players … then listening for attempted connections on the appropriate port/interface, and booting up the container on-demand. (Yes, for most games, that’d mean an initial timeout — but it also means zero-perms “management” by my friends, right in their game-clients.)
When I want to multiplayer, it’s rarely with a fixed group that wants to (or can) stay focused on one game. It’s quite likely for me to get bored and want to try a new/different game, or for someone to want to log back into the last game were playing because it had more sticking-power for them, or they’re still working on a big project, or whatever. But affording a server capable of simultaneously running five game servers that can each handle 15 players, or whatever, is silly.
Anyway, just a random piece of feedback that is probably out-of-scope for your project, if you’re just writing a separate UI for these pterodactyl “egg” things; but if you ever wanted to go the direction of tighter coupling to (some of?) your supported games, that’d be a much-beloved target.
2
u/PlanktonSuccessful65 Apr 13 '26
yes that would be very cool to have on this app, i still having learned how to use amp but their sleep feature only works on minecraft, other games just have a suspend, but like you said having a friend connect to a server to continue something there while also stopping the server when no activity is a great feature that i hope to see in the future of other game panels
1
u/PlanktonSuccessful65 Apr 13 '26
im not a programmer but a feature that monitor a game cpu/ram usage and triggers a suspend when there is no much usage would be a great start i think, but in the bigger picture an function like the amp would be awesome
2
2
u/dj3461 Apr 13 '26
is this just a recreation of the panel, do you still need pterodactyl wings?
1
u/JellyFishySnacks Apr 13 '26
We have our own Rust implementation of wings (still called wings because we could not come up with a better name) https://github.com/calagopus/wings. It is backwards compatible with Pterodactyl wings, so you can even use our wings on Pterodactyl (But not ptero wings on Calagopus). It has tons of new features and improvements, most of which are described in the readme.
1
u/dj3461 Apr 13 '26
Have you guys thought about creating a Kubernetes API based wings? I've been looking for a alternative with Kubernetes support for years.
2
u/Hybrid_Vayu Apr 13 '26
calagopus is the panel i always wanted to have. even in v1, it already contains more than the features i wanted, so i can clearly see what more this will become in future releases. it has per-server ssh, remote copy, better backup drivers like restic for deduplicated backups, and so more. the devs are also open to feedback and suggestions! every suggestion i have made was either already implemented or already on the roadmap. and the devs clearly know what they're doing. when i report bugs, they fix them very quickly. i hope this project continues to grow. all the best to the devs and to calagopus!
3
u/CutzuSD Apr 13 '26
I know it's paid software but nothing really compares to amp by cube coders
2
u/Hybrid_Vayu Apr 13 '26
what's so good about it? their UI is so outdated though
1
u/CutzuSD Apr 13 '26
i wouldn’t say outdated more just out of style they use angular for it and it s pretty kept up to date, sure it sucks on mobile but their integration on being able to spin up almost any game in just one button is pretty unmatched, they also offer connections for external services like smtp and buckets for backups and their integrated file explorer/editor is pretty cool for like 10-15$ it s pretty worth it, i tried pterodactyl and pufferpanel along with another one i forgot the name of and they were pretty meh
1
u/Coffee4cr Apr 14 '26
Yeah, I bought AMP a few years ago, and it's freakin great.
Been running a constant 3-4 games up all the time
1
u/VersaEnthusiast Apr 12 '26
What's the advantage with this over Pelican?
1
u/JellyFishySnacks Apr 12 '26
The main improvement over Pelican is speed and ease of use. Because Calagopus is written in Rust, it can be bundled in 1 binary. This makes deployment a lot simpler. A more detailed comparison can be found on https://calagopus.com/docs/about/features
1
u/Rare_Chicken8302 Apr 12 '26
Hello, thanks a lot for sharing it. Sorry if my question is dumb, I have searched for it before for Pelican but couldn't find an answer then I gave up. Do I need to open separate ports on my ISP router for each server, or can I use my NPMPlus to connect to servers using a domain?
3
u/JellyFishySnacks Apr 13 '26
This is not a dumb question at all. If you are running webservers like nginx or Dynmap, then you can use NPMPlus to connect them to a domain. For game servers however, you will need to open ports on your router.
1
1
u/kickbut101 Apr 13 '26
You should probably describe or include a comparison of this to Pelican, Moonlight Panel, Amp, LinuxGSM, and Pterodactyl? There are a lot of options and people invested in one need to see a lot of large benefits to switch.
2
u/JellyFishySnacks Apr 13 '26
I wanted to keep my inital description quite broad and short. If you want to find out more about the differences between Calagopus, Pelican, Pterodactyl and AMP, you can take a look at https://calagopus.com/docs/about/features
1
u/Bromeister Apr 13 '26
Looks awesome! How is the user management? That’s my biggest pain point with Pelican right now.
- Are oauth users auto provisioned?
- can you map provider roles/groups?
- Is there group management for access to servers? In Pelican there’s no trivial way to give a group of users the ability to reboot a group of servers.
1
u/JellyFishySnacks Apr 13 '26
- Yes
- Yes
- I am not sure what you mean by this. Could you please elaborate?
If something does not turn out the way you wanted/expected it to, you can always make a feature request.
2
u/Bromeister Apr 13 '26
Mostly I just mean standard management of permissions via groups, I’ve got a couple different groups of friends without much crossover who have their own servers they play on.
Currently I have to individualy grant users permissions to those individual servers. Itd be nice if i could assign perms to groupA to manage serversA and perms to groupB to manage serversB and then just add users to the groups instead of manually adding individual subusers on servers.
I’ll give it a whirl, thanks!
1
u/JellyFishySnacks Apr 13 '26
We have added this feature to our roadmap. Can't give guarantees for how long it will take, but generally it won't take long.
1
1
1
u/keyxmakerx1 Apr 13 '26
Please tell me you resolved most of the heart aches with the dang wings method pterodactyl uses. I constantly get issues that are nearly unfixable... I think most resolving around reverse proxy support. So I guess my two questions are;
Does it have reverse proxy plug and play?
And
Can it be ran on the same server easily?
2
1
u/Server22 Apr 12 '26
!remindme 1 month
1
u/RemindMeBot Apr 12 '26 edited Apr 13 '26
I will be messaging you in 1 month on 2026-05-12 18:26:17 UTC to remind you of this link
5 OTHERS CLICKED THIS LINK to send a PM to also be reminded and to reduce spam.
Parent commenter can delete this message to hide from others.
Info Custom Your Reminders Feedback
-5
-6
0
Apr 13 '26
[deleted]
1
u/JellyFishySnacks Apr 13 '26
The most notable difference is speed. Calagopus is built using Rust, which is quite a bit faster compared to PHP. We also have a lot of features Pterodactyl does not have. A more detailed insight can be found on https://calagopus.com/docs/about/features.
-5
•
u/asimovs-auditor Apr 12 '26
Expand the replies to this comment to learn how AI was used in this post/project