Building from Source

Prerequisites

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

Go 1.24+
Bun 1.2+
Docker (also used to run buf for protobuf code generation)
Make

Build steps

# Clone the repo
git clone https://github.com/athNdev/carbon-panel.git
cd carbon-panel

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

# Install frontend dependencies and build
cd web/carbon-panel && bun install && bun run build && cd ../..

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

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

Live Development (Hot Reloading)

For active development with live reload for both backend and frontend:

# Using Bun (Recommended):
bun run dev

# Or using Make:
make dev

# Or Windows (PowerShell):
.\scripts\dev.ps1

# Or Linux/macOS (Bash):
./scripts/dev.sh

Frontend (Vite HMR): http://localhost:5174
Backend API: http://localhost:8080

Running

# Using default config (./config.yaml if it exists, otherwise defaults)
./carbon-panel

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

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

When running the binary directly on a host (not in a Docker container), no path translation is needed: the Docker daemon sees the same filesystem the panel does, and the directories are used as-is. CARBONPANEL_DATA_DIR and CARBONPANEL_HOST_DATA_PATH are legacy overrides and are not required.

To change where Carbon Panel stores its database and server data, set CARBONPANEL_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.