What is Catalyst?
Catalyst is a self-hosted game-server control panel. You install it on your own infrastructure and use it to create, run, and share game servers — Minecraft and anything else a template supports — through a web interface instead of SSH and hand-edited config files.
Four ideas explain almost everything in these docs.
The panel is the web application you log in to. It stores users, roles, servers, and settings, and it coordinates everything else. Administrators install and update the panel; server owners mostly live inside it.
A node is a machine that actually runs game servers. Each node runs the Catalyst agent, a small service that starts and stops game servers, streams console output, and reports health back to the panel. One panel can manage many nodes, and nodes can live in different datacenters.
Server
Section titled “Server”A server is one running game — a single Minecraft world with its own files, memory limit, network ports, backups, and databases. A server always lives on exactly one node. Server owners manage it through tabs such as Console, Files, Backups, and Databases.
Allocations
Section titled “Allocations”Every server listens on one or more allocations — IP address and port pairs drawn from its node’s pool. The primary allocation is the address players join; Networking explains the rest, and connecting to your server shows how to find your address.
Templates
Section titled “Templates”A template is an installable game recipe: the image, startup command, default settings, and install script. Administrators manage templates; creating a server is mostly picking a template and choosing resources.
Related
Section titled “Related”- Server owners: create your first server.
- New operators: install Catalyst.
- Integrators: tour the API.