If you’re running a homelab (or busy building the perfect homelab) and love self-hosting your own services, setting up game servers is one of the most fun and rewarding projects you can tackle. Whether you want a private Minecraft world for your friends or a Valheim server running 24/7 in your basement rack, having the right game server management software is essential. If you are only interested in Minecraft, take a look at our step-by-step guide for hosting a Crafty Controller Minecraft server in Proxmox or a Turnkey Linux Minecraft server in Proxmox. If you want a bit more freedom for other games that you and your friends are playing, you will need a service with a bit more features. That’s where Pelican comes in: a modern, flexible, and developer-friendly game server management solution designed for self-hosters and professionals alike.
What is Pelican?
Pelican is an open-source game server management platform, designed to help you easily deploy and manage game servers in Docker containers. Think of it as the DevOps-inspired evolution of traditional game server panels. Pelican is made up of two core components:
- Pelican Panel – The web interface and API backend used to manage your game servers.
- Pelican Wings – The lightweight agent that runs on your server hardware and actually hosts the game servers themselves.
Unlike some monolithic panels, Pelican takes a distributed, containerized, and modular approach: a perfect match for homelab setups and Docker-heavy environments.
Pelican Dashboard – Image Credit: pelican.dev
Hosting Pelican in Your Homelab
Pelican is designed with self-hosters in mind. If you’re running Proxmox, TrueNAS, or even just a Raspberry Pi cluster, you can spin up Pelican with Docker Compose or Kubernetes. It supports multiple Wings nodes (different game servers), so you can scale your setup across different machines in your homelab, dedicating specific nodes to resource-heavy games like Rust or ARK.
You can even mix and match OSes. Host your Panel on a Linux VM and deploy Wings on a separate Windows server if a specific game requires it. All communication is done via secure HTTPS, so you’re not exposing random ports to the public. There is even an option to install certain game servers on ARM processors like the Raspberry Pi. Running a Factorio server on a Raspberry Pi is just so cool…
Create a new Pelican Node – Image Credit: pelican.dev
Pelican Panel vs. Pelican Wings
Pelican Panel
Pelican Panel is the brains of the operation: it’s where you create users, deploy servers, manage configurations, and monitor usage. It provides a sleek web interface and a well-documented REST API. You can think of it like the command center for your homelab’s game hosting capabilities. You only need to install this once, and this is what you will access to install actual game servers on the server nodes, called Pelican Wings.
Pelican Wings
Wings is the engine: a small agent that runs on each node (bare-metal, VM, or container) where you want to host game servers. It handles the lifecycle of containers: starting, stopping, updating, and communicating status back to the Panel. Wings uses Docker under the hood, so all servers are neatly containerized and sandboxed. You can install multiple Wings instances and all connect to the same Panel instance. So you can spread out your game servers over your hardware.
Together, Panel and Wings give you a modern, modular game server management platform that feels right at home in a self-hosted environment.
Pelican Node List – Image Credit: pelican.dev
How is Pelican Different from Pterodactyl?
Many self-hosters are familiar with Pterodactyl Panel, a well-known game server management panel. While it’s popular, it comes with limitations:
| Feature | Pelican | Pterodactyl |
|---|---|---|
| Written in | Go + Svelte | PHP + Vue |
| Uses Docker | ✅ Yes, native | ✅ Yes |
| Eggs as code | ✅ YAML/JSON in Git | ❌ Requires panel UI import |
| Multi-node support | ✅ First-class | ✅ Yes |
| REST API | ✅ Modern & documented | ✅ Limited, but still very robust |
| Kubernetes support | ✅ In development | ❌ No |
| Built for DevOps | ✅ Designed for containers & GitOps | ❌ Not natively |
Pelican is container-native, meaning each game server is spun up as a Docker container with isolated resources, making it easier to manage, secure, and back up. The modern tech stack (Go + Svelte) also makes it easier to contribute to or extend.
The main difference is the services that can be run on Pelican. Pelican can run development or database services over and above just game servers or voice servers like Pterodactyl.
What Are Pelican “Eggs”?
Pelican uses “eggs” to define how to build and run game servers. An egg is a declarative configuration file (YAML or JSON) that tells Wings how to launch a specific game, which Docker image to use, which ports to expose, and what environment variables to set.
And here’s the best part: eggs live in Git, not inside a database. This makes it incredibly easy to:
- Keep your eggs under version control
- Customize or fork eggs for your own needs
- Reuse and share eggs across environments
- Deploy new eggs with CI/CD pipelines
Pelican’s egg system aligns perfectly with infrastructure-as-code and GitOps principles.
Creating a new Palword server in Pelican – Image Credit: pelican.dev
Supported Game Servers
Pelican supports a large and growing number of game servers, including:
- Minecraft (Java, Bedrock, Paper, Fabric, Forge, etc.)
- Valheim
- Rust
- ARK: Survival Evolved
- Terraria
- Factorio
- Counter-Strike: GO
- Team Fortress 2
- Satisfactory
- Palworld
- Many more via custom Docker images
Each server is defined through an egg, and you can easily create your own if the community hasn’t published one yet.
This broad game support is a major advantage over other platforms. With Pelican, you’re not just limited to a handful of game types: you can host almost anything that can run in a Docker container.
For a full list of eggs, head over the the Pelican Eggs page
Bonus: Features Self-Hosters Will Love
- Docker-native: Game servers are isolated, clean, and portable.
- API-first: Automate everything with webhooks or scripts.
- Secrets and environment variables: No need to hardcode keys or passwords.
- Declarative configuration: Eggs as code means you can automate everything.
- Multi-architecture support: Host on ARM or x86_64 machines.
- Git-based egg management: Just
git pullto update server recipes. - Templating support: Define reusable server templates with variables.
Conclusion: Why Self-Hosters Should Look at Pelican
Pelican is a modern, flexible, and container-native game server platform, tailor-made for homelab enthusiasts and self-hosters. With a clean separation of concerns between Panel and Wings, GitOps-friendly configuration, Docker support, and a huge range of game server options, Pelican puts powerful game hosting at your fingertips.
If you’re looking to run your own Minecraft, Rust, or Valheim servers — and want more flexibility than Pterodactyl or traditional methods offer — Pelican is absolutely worth checking out. It’s fast, extensible, developer-friendly, and built with self-hosting in mind.
So grab your favorite homelab server, spin up Pelican, and start hosting your own game worlds!