Unicorn Panel v1 is public!

Hello everyone, and welcome!

I'm thrilled to announce that Unicorn Panel v1 is officially released. This is our first stable version, which means it's ready for you to install and start using.

Before anything else, I want to say a sincere thank you. Some of you reached out, asked questions, and joined this forum before there was even a release to try. That early interest and support meant a lot to us and helped push this launch over the finish line.

Resources: Website | Documentation | FAQs | Demo

What is Unicorn Panel?

Unicorn Panel (UPCP) is a cutting-edge web hosting control panel engineered for multi-server fleets. Unicorn streamlines infrastructure management, allowing you to provision, oversee, and monitor all your websites, databases, mailboxes, and DNS zones across your entire fleet from a single, centralized interface.

Unicorn started as a scratch-our-own-itch project back in 2022. None of the existing control panels did what we wanted, and the ones that came close felt like they were built on top of decisions made ten years ago. We wanted per-tenant containers, backups that actually work, a real API, a fast SPA, no license servers phoning home with private data, and a codebase small enough that one person could hold it in their head... that last part has completely been outgrown.

The last cycle rewrote big pieces of the panel from the ground up: the backup engine, the mail stack, the firewall, the database layer, the update system, the collaborator model. 1.0 is the version where all of that feels finished enough to stop calling it beta.

What can you do with Unicorn Panel?

• Sites. Add a website, get a container. Isolated PHP, Apache, NGINX, OpenLiteSpeed, or our very own Sleipnir, auto SSL for the domain plus every subdomain and alias you attach.
• Databases. MariaDB, MySQL and PostgreSQL for shared workloads. Mimir sidecars when you want a database that lives inside the tenant container itself, with no shared instance.
• Email. Hermes with per-domain hostnames, DKIM, spam handling, webmail. Multi-hostname certificates so mail.example.com and mail.otherbrand.com both work under one Hermes.
• Backups. Local plus remote (S3-compatible, SFTP, rsync). Incrementals with full chain-walk restore, so picking yesterday's backup restores yesterday's site, not a broken delta. The selective file picker walks the whole chain and downloads only the archives it actually needs.
• Cluster. Add secondaries with one line. The primary syncs settings, backups metadata, mail state, DNS. Every panel action forwards to the right server automatically.
• Collaborators and resellers. Per-account branding, per-site collaborators with per-role permissions, package limits.
• File manager. Per-tenant jailed, streams multi-GB downloads through the unicorn daemon so PHP never has to hold them.
• Firewall. Managed rules, per-role port opens, protection against the usual noise.
• Malware scanning. ClamAV plus LMD, tuned so it does not chew CPU or false-flag every image on the server.
• API. Every panel action is a REST endpoint. Auth is per-server API keys.

Hardware requirements

1. A blank (no other software) VPS or bare metal server.
2. Alpine v3.20 or above. We recommend the latest version of Alpine Linux.
3. A minimum of 500MB RAM and 5GB storage.

If installing on a server with low RAM requirements, we recommend enabling swap. Customer data is stored in /opt/upcp/containers. You may partition /opt/upcp or /opt/upcp/containers to maximize space on the server.

If you are installing an Email role, mailbox data is stored in /opt/upcp/services/upcp-ues/data.

If you are installing a Backup role the data is stored at /backups. This location can be a partition, network mount, external storage, etc.

The very first server you install Unicorn on will be automatically designated as the Primary Control Panel. We recommend using a provider with snapshot/backup capability for disaster recovery purposes and recommend this control panel have more than 1 CPU core. If you're only hosting ~10 websites on a 1 core server, you should be OK, but may see less than ideal response times in the control panel. At this time there is no facility to migrate the Primary Control Panel to a new server.

Installing Unicorn Panel

To install Unicorn Panel, run the following command:

wget -qO- https://unicornpanel.com/install | sh

You must run this command as root.

1. Hit Enter. This will trigger the installation process.
2. Wait for this process to finish and you will be presented with a link and login details to your administration account.
3. If you're unable to visit the link presented to you, please make sure your firewall has port 8727 open.
4. Once logged in, navigate to My Account (click your user icon, bottom left) -> Password to update your details and change the password. We highly recommend navigating to Login Security in this section to enable 2FA or Passkeys. Please note, Passkeys will only work on a fully qualified domain name.
5. If you forget your admin password, type unicorn root reset-admin-password in your terminal to generate a new password.
6. If you have a license key, navigate to Settings -> License Key and enter your key. After successful validation, the control panel will unlock all features.
7. At this stage Unicorn Panel is now installed on your desired server and will be functioning correctly. Please allow a few minutes for CPU usage to reduce.

Getting Started

Now that the Primary Control Panel has been installed, there are a few more steps you might need to do, you can follow these steps in our documentation. Please note, we're still developing and expanding the docs.

Get involved

Whether you've found a bug, have an idea for a feature, or just want to share how you're using Unicorn Panel, we'd love to hear from you. Tell us what you are running, what you switched from, and what would make you fall in love with UPCP faster. We will be answering questions all week.

Thanks for trusting us with your servers. Excited to see what you build.

Sully