Start

Installation

From a brand-new droplet to a signed-in panel in about ten minutes. The provision script does the heavy lifting; this page walks through it.

Getting access

StackPanel is available by request and its code lives in a private GitHub repository, SCC-Pro/server-manager. To get started, email info@endor.digital with a little about your setup: how many servers, which provider, and what you host. Once you're approved, the repository is opened to your server with a read-only deploy key, as described in step 1 below.

Requirements

• A DigitalOcean droplet running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. 1 GB of RAM works (the script adds swap); 2 GB or more is recommended if you build front-end assets on the server.
• Root SSH access to the droplet.
• Access to your DNS so you can point domains at the droplet's IP.
• Ports 22, 80, 443 and the panel port (default 8090) reachable. If you use a DigitalOcean Cloud Firewall, open them there too.

Quick start

1. Give the droplet read access to the repository

   Create an SSH key for root on the droplet. Its public key is added to the repository as a read-only deploy key: send it in reply to your access confirmation, or add it yourself under Settings → Deploy keys if you administer the repository.

   $ ssh root@YOUR_DROPLET_IP
   $ ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -N "" -f ~/.ssh/id_ed25519 -C "root@$(hostname)"
   $ cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub        # this is the deploy key
   $ ssh-keyscan github.com >> ~/.ssh/known_hosts

   Once the key has been added, check it with ssh -T git@github.com: it should greet the repository, not say "Permission denied".

2. Clone the code

   Clone into /opt/server-manager:

   $ git clone git@github.com:SCC-Pro/server-manager.git /opt/server-manager

3. Run the provision script

   Choose the PHP versions you need and the email for signing in and Let's Encrypt notices:

   $ cd /opt/server-manager
   $ bash provision/provision.sh --php "8.3 8.4" --email you@example.com

   It takes 5–10 minutes. Every option is described in Provision script. A full log is written to /var/log/server-manager-provision.log.

4. Note the credentials

   At the end the script prints the panel URL, email and a generated password, and saves them to /root/server-manager-credentials.txt (readable by root only). Delete that file once you've stored the password somewhere safe.

   ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
    Provisioning complete
     Panel     http://203.0.113.10:8090
     Email     you@example.com
     Password  hT4n…(20 characters)

5. Sign in

   Open the URL. You land on the dashboard showing live server stats.

Already have a provisioned host?

If nginx, PHP-FPM, MySQL, certbot and Supervisor are already installed the way the script would set them up, you can start the panel by hand:

$ cd /opt/server-manager
$ cp .env.example .env && chmod 600 .env
$ nano .env            # set SM_ADMIN_EMAIL, SM_ADMIN_PASSWORD, SM_MYSQL_PASSWORD …
$ docker compose up -d --build

The MySQL account in SM_MYSQL_USER needs ALL PRIVILEGES ON *.* WITH GRANT OPTION so it can create databases and users. Re-running provision.sh later is safe: it keeps existing passwords and the .env.

First sign-in checklist

1. Settings → Let's Encrypt: confirm the contact email. Certificates can't be issued without it.
2. Account → Two-factor authentication (your name, in the sidebar's Panel section): scan the QR code with your authenticator app and confirm a code.
3. Users → Add user for each teammate, so nobody else needs the main administrator login. They must set up 2FA on first sign-in.
4. Settings → Panel domain (optional but recommended), e.g. panel.example.com with SSL. See Panel domain & HTTPS.
5. Check the Dashboard → Services card: nginx, mysql, supervisor, cron and each phpX.Y-fpm should be active.
6. Create your first project with Create new → Project. Projects covers each step.