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, Rust, CS2, ARK, and more — through a web interface instead of SSH and hand-edited config files.
Three 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 containers, 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 game instance — for example, 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 their server through tabs such as Console, Files, Backups, and Databases.
Templates
Section titled “Templates”A template (imported from a Pterodactyl egg, or built in) describes how to run a particular game: the container image, startup command, default settings, and install script. Administrators manage templates; creating a server is mostly picking a template and choosing resources.
Where to go next
Section titled “Where to go next”- Server owners: create your first server.
- New operators: install Catalyst.
- Integrators: tour the API.