01 — OVERVIEW
Self-hosted Minecraft panel at minecraft.tiiow.com
Pterodactyl is a self-hosted game server management panel. I set it up on my TrueNAS server so I can host Minecraft servers for friends with a proper admin interface — create servers, set resource limits, manage files, and restart without SSH.
02 — ARCHITECTURE
Stack
| panel | Docker Compose on TrueNAS SCALE. MariaDB + Redis backend, on an internal port behind the reverse proxy. |
| wings | Pterodactyl Wings daemon running as a systemd service on the same host. Handles the actual game server processes on its own internal port. |
| reverse proxy | Nginx Proxy Manager routes minecraft.tiiow.com to the panel. Cloudflare handles SSL and DDoS protection. |
| game ports | A small range of TCP + UDP ports, forwarded on the router for direct Minecraft connections. |
| storage | Server volumes live on a dedicated dataset on the TrueNAS pool. |
03 — SETUP NOTES
Challenges
TrueNAS apps take ports 80, 443, 8080, and 8443 so those were off limits. The panel runs on a spare high port behind NPM, which handles the public HTTPS endpoint. Wings needs to be reachable from the panel so both the panel config and Wings config point to the TrueNAS LAN IP.
Note: An existing Forge 1.7.10 server runs separately on its own port — left untouched. Pterodactyl manages new servers only.