Building from Source

Prerequisites

DiscoPanel manages Minecraft servers as Docker containers, so Docker is required both at build time and runtime.

• Go 1.24+
• Node.js 22+
• Docker (also used to run buf for protobuf code generation)
• Make

Build steps

# Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/nickheyer/discopanel.git
cd discopanel

# Generate protobuf code (Go + TypeScript) via Docker buf
make gen

# Install frontend dependencies and build
cd web/discopanel && npm install && npm run build && cd ../..

# Build the Go binary with embedded frontend
go build -o discopanel cmd/discopanel/main.go

The //go:embed directives bake the frontend build into the binary so it serves the UI without a separate web server.

Running

# Using default config (./config.yaml if it exists, otherwise defaults)
./discopanel

# Or point to a specific config file
./discopanel -config /path/to/config.yaml

All config options can also be set via environment variables with the DISCOPANEL_ prefix. For example, server.port becomes DISCOPANEL_SERVER_PORT. Environment variables take precedence over the config file.

Host path mapping

When running the binary directly on a host (not in a Docker container), do not set DISCOPANEL_DATA_DIR or DISCOPANEL_HOST_DATA_PATH — those are only for container path translation.

To change where DiscoPanel stores its database and server data, set DISCOPANEL_STORAGE_DATA_DIR or configure it in your config file:

storage:
  data_dir: /your/path  # Default: ./data (relative to working directory)

For all available configuration options, see Configuration.