Pelican

Welcome to the first 2026 guide!

While I am using this as my 'production' environment, it is undergoing many changes

Pelican is a fork of Pterodactyl that is currently in beta. It has some pretty cool features like OAuth and supports plugins.

You can view a comparison of Pelican vs Pterodactyl here

Total Time Required

2 Hours

Difficulty

Moderate

Required Knowledge

Docker Compose, DNS, Cloudflare Zero Trust, Linux Servers

What does this stack do?

This stack is split into 2 pieces - the front end panel and the backend node. This is for a few reasons,

• recommended by the devs

• reduces issues from things starting up before others

• easier to set up additional nodes if wanted

I've had a focus on security and ease of use for these 2 stacks. Using the correct env values (covered later), this compose file will automatically build a strong and secure hosting environment for your game servers. I've done this by using initialization containers to build and download configuration files, and Crowdsec for security.

My repository for the Crowdsec configurations

Container	Function
Node / Wings	The software that hosts and manages game servers. You can connect multiple Wings nodes to a singular panel
Panel / Pelican	The front end UI used to manage multiple nodes
Dockflare	Dockflare is a IaC solution for managing Cloudflare Tunnel routes using Docker labels. This compose stack uses the dockflare label prefix dfpelican If you are using Dockflare elsewhere in your homelab, I would highly advise changing the label prefix as you may experience issues with this compose file taking over other Dockflare tunnels The version of Dockflare used will grab ANY container with the dockflare or cloudflare.tunnel labels, even though we've set the prefix
Cloudflare Tunnel	The "bridge" between your internal network and Cloudflare servers. Web apps are tunnelled through this, allowing a public address to reach an internal resource. Access is secured with CF Zero Trust The tunnel is created by Dockflare outside of the compose file - you will need to manually delete it if you delete the compose stack
Crowdsec Engine	Crowdsec is a crowdsourced cyber security tool. It monitors the Wings SFTP logs for brute force attempts adds the IP address to a 4 hour blocklist. It also adds known bad IPs to your Cloudflare firewall, forcing them to do a Captcha before accessing anything. If a device is incorrectly blocked, refer to Crowdsec
Firewall Bouncer	This is the 'bridge' between the Crowdsec Engine container and the firewall on your machine
Cloudflare Bouncer	This is the 'bridge' between Crowdsec Engine and your Cloudflare Security Rules

Prerequisites

Please ensure you meet these before continuing.

Requirements

• A Linux based machine or VM with

  • Docker installed

• A Domain that's managed by Cloudflare

• Cloudflare Zero Trust tunnel

• A text editor

• Not behind a CGNat (you can use a tool like Hamachi or Tailscale to bypass this requirement but this documentation does not include that)

You do NOT need a static IP

Recommended

• Manage your Compose Files in GitHub (this manages updates too)

• A decently spec'd machine to host the servers on

  • High single thread passmark CPUs (required for Minecraft)

  • Lots of RAM

  • SSD storage

• Gmail SMTP account

• A free / community Crowdsec account

• Read Guides

Before you start,

You will need to select some subdomains and ports

Take note of this data in a txt document or somewhere nearby, or fill out the below chart. I have prefilled it with example data

	Example Data
Domain	example.com
Subdomain for Panel	panel
Subdomain for node	node1
Subdomain for game servers and SFTP	play
Game server port range	6600-6700
From email address	[email protected]
SFTP Port	2022

If you are setting up multiple nodes, the node subdomain must be unique