A Pterodactyl alternative that runs your eggs

Zelie reads eggs in both the Pterodactyl and the Pelican format. The games your panel runs today run on Zelie too.

• 21 games ready to pick, from Minecraft with Paper, Fabric and Forge to Rust, Valheim, ARK, Palworld and Counter-Strike 2. They come from Pelican’s egg repositories, and every one is downloaded and checked on each release.
• Any other egg by its link. Paste the link to an egg and create the server from it.
• The tools you know. A live console, a file manager with an editor, SFTP, schedules, backups and ports you pick per use: game, query, RCON or Rust+.

A Pterodactyl install is a PHP (Laravel) panel with a web server, a queue worker, MySQL and Redis, plus the Wings daemon and Docker on each machine. Pelican keeps the same design.

Zelie is one file of about 50 MB, with its state in SQLite. Its own processes stay under 66 MB of memory when idle, and its test runs fail if they grow past that. On a live server I measured Pelican’s panel, queue worker and Wings at about 230 MB, before the database and Docker. The memory you save goes to your players.

Installing Pterodactyl means following a long guide: PHP and its extensions, a web server, a database, a queue worker, cron, then Wings and Docker. Zelie is one command. It checks the release’s signature, asks how the panel should be reached, and sets up the rest.

New releases show up on the Server page and install with one click. Game servers keep running while Zelie updates, and if the new version does not come up within a minute and a half, the old one is put back by itself. Steam games can update themselves too, when nobody is playing.

• Root has no port. The part of Zelie that runs as root listens on no network port. The web panel runs as its own user, so a bug in it is not a bug with root rights.
• Two-step login for everyone. Every account needs a passkey or an authenticator app, not only the careful ones.
• SFTP that stays in its lane. A login reaches that one server’s files. The SFTP server has no rights of its own, and it only runs while someone is connected.
• Sealed secrets and encrypted backups. Passwords and keys are sealed as they are saved. Backups are encrypted on the server before a copy goes to S3.

The same panel deploys a site or a Discord bot from GitHub, gives it HTTPS, and runs PostgreSQL, MariaDB or Redis for it. Your server’s website, its database and the game itself sit under one login, with metrics for each. See the game server panel page for everything it does for a game.

A game server is its egg and its files, so moving one takes a few minutes.

1. 01Install Zelie and set up its pool of game ports.
2. 02Create the server from the same egg. If it is not in the list, import the egg by its link.
3. 03Stop the old server, then download its files over SFTP and upload them to Zelie over SFTP or with the file manager.
4. 04Check the startup variables and the ports, then start it.

You can try Zelie on the same machine first. It brings its own containerd and never touches Docker’s containers or firewall rules.

• SFTP. Wings listens on port 2022 and Zelie on 2222, so they do not clash.
• Web ports. With a domain, Zelie wants ports 80 and 443. If another web server has them, reach Zelie through a Cloudflare Tunnel instead.
• Game ports. Give each panel its own range, so two servers never ask for the same port.