User Game Server Creator (UGSC)

A Pelican Panel plugin that lets non-admin users create their own game servers through a simplified, self-service flow — without needing access to the full admin server-creation form.

Friends pick a game from a visual picker, adjust a player-count slider, and deploy. Resource limits, node capacity, and required egg variables are all handled automatically.

Why

Pelican's built-in server creation is an admin-only flow with a full form of every egg variable, node selection, and raw resource fields. UGSC adds a parallel, restricted flow so trusted non-admin users (e.g. a friend group) can spin up their own servers within limits an admin sets, without ever touching the admin panel.

Features

• Visual game picker — browse available eggs by category with artwork (grid/banner/list images), instead of a raw dropdown.
• Simplified configure page — a single player-count slider drives CPU/memory (and map size, for supported eggs) via linear interpolation between admin-configured min/max values, instead of asking users to guess raw resource numbers.
• Per-user resource limits — admins set a CPU/memory/disk/server-count budget per user (ugsc_user_resource_limits); users cannot exceed their own budget.
• Node capacity guard — independent of user budgets, a request is also checked against the actual node's physical capacity:
  • CPU / memory: a soft warning (with an in-page confirm dialog) if the request exceeds what's currently free on the node, and a hard block if it exceeds the node's raw configured total.
  • Disk: always hard-blocked the moment it exceeds free disk space. Disk is never allowed to be overallocated, regardless of node settings.
  • Both checks run on the client (for instant feedback) and independently on the server (the actual enforcement boundary — a direct API call cannot bypass it).
• Server variables page — after configuring resources, users are shown any required, user-editable egg variables (pre-filled with admin-configured defaults), matching what's normally only available on the full admin create-server form. Admin-only variables are hidden unless they have no usable default, in which case they're surfaced as a flagged exception so server creation never silently fails.
• Image management — per-egg grid/banner/list artwork with manual fetch/upload/protect/clear actions, plus bulk operations, in a dedicated admin page (Icon Settings).
• Permissions / visibility system — built on Pelican's native Subuser system. Admins can grant a user visibility (and therefore console/start/stop/restart access) and/or delete rights on specific other-owned servers, with bulk grant-all/revoke-all actions.
• Server deletion controls — owners can be locked out of deleting their own server, and non-owners can be individually granted delete rights on specific servers.
• Categories & per-egg settings — admin-configurable categories for the game picker, and per-egg settings (player count range, base/max CPU and memory, disk size, slots-mode toggle).

Requirements

• Pelican Panel ^1.0.0-beta35 or later.

Installation

1. Download the latest release zip (or clone this repo into plugins/user-game-server-creator).
2. Make sure the folder name is exactly user-game-server-creator (must match the plugin id in plugin.json).
3. From your panel directory, run:

   php artisan migrate
   php artisan optimize:clear

4. Enable the plugin from the admin panel's plugin list if it's not already active.

Setting up access for a user

A user has no access to UGSC (cannot see the game picker or create servers) until an admin explicitly grants them resource limits:

1. Go to Game Server Creator Settings > User Resource Limits in the admin panel.
2. Create a record for the user, setting their CPU / memory / disk / server-count budget (use 0 or leave blank for unlimited, depending on the field).
3. The user can now access the create-server flow from the app panel.

Root admins always have full access regardless of this table.

Per-egg setup

Before a game can be created through UGSC, an admin should configure it:

• Egg Settings (Game Server Creator Settings > Egg Settings): player count range, base/max CPU and memory for the slider interpolation, disk size, and whether the egg uses "slots" or "max players" terminology.
• Icon Settings (Game Server Creator Settings > Icon Settings): fetch or upload grid/banner/list artwork per egg, with an option to protect images from being overwritten by bulk fetches.
• Categories (Game Server Creator Settings > Categories): group eggs for the game picker.

Eggs with no Egg Settings configured won't behave correctly on the slider page — set these up for every game you want to expose through UGSC.

Node capacity guard details

The guard intentionally treats disk differently from CPU/memory, since disk cannot be safely overcommitted the way compute resources can:

This applies on top of, not instead of, each user's own resource budget. Pelican's node overallocate settings are intentionally not used by this guard — the raw cpu/memory/disk columns on the node are the source of truth.

Permissions model

• Visibility grants use Pelican's native Subuser system and bundle console access, start, stop, and restart permissions together — there is currently no way to grant view-only access without also granting control.
• Delete grants are a separate UGSC-specific table (ugsc_server_delete_grants) and require visibility to already be granted (delete implies visibility).
• Server owners can be locked from deleting their own server via ugsc_server_delete_locks.

Known limitations

• Egg variables that are not marked user_editable and have no default value are surfaced on the variables page as a flagged exception, but there is no per-egg validation beyond what Pelican's own server creation service enforces.
• The node capacity guard does not account for multiple concurrent in-flight requests racing each other (last-write-wins at the database level, same as Pelican's own admin creation flow).

License

MIT — see LICENSE.