Hosting & Maintenance

A short guide for panel administrators: what must keep running, where the extension keeps its data, and the checks worth doing once a month.

The scheduler and queue worker

File Manager Pro registers a handful of scheduled jobs through the panel's normal scheduler:

Job	When	What it does
Purge	hourly	Removes expired Recycle Bin items
Reconcile	hourly	Rebuilds bin records from the bin folder and reports drift
Prune	daily	Removes old versions beyond retention and quota, keeping pinned versions
Watch	every few minutes	Checks tracked files for changes made outside the panel
Temporary files	every few minutes	Deletes expired temporary download archives
Cache trim	hourly	Trims thumbnail, media and database caches

Run the panel scheduler the way you normally do:

* * * * * cd /path/to/pterodactyl && php artisan schedule:run >> /dev/null 2>&1

Folder sizes and some maintenance actions run as queued jobs. Run a worker under your process manager:

php artisan queue:work --tries=3 --timeout=900

If neither runs, the panel warns you on Admin → Overview, and the Recycle Bin keeps items past their retention period. You can also run any maintenance task by hand:

php artisan file-manager-pro:maintain purge
php artisan file-manager-pro:maintain reconcile
php artisan file-manager-pro:maintain prune

Requirements your host must keep

• GD for thumbnails. Without it, thumbnails turn off and previews still work.
• ZipArchive for archive previews.
• pdo_sqlite for the database viewer.
• The PHP CLI binary next to the PHP-FPM binary, if you keep "decode images in a separate process" enabled. That option keeps large images from using web-worker memory.

The extension's settings screen shows which of these are present under its System panel.

Where data lives

Data	Location
Stored versions	storage/app/file-manager-pro (or your configured S3 bucket)
Recycle Bin files	Inside each server's own files
Thumbnail, media and database caches	storage/app/file-manager-pro
Activity entries	The panel's own activity log

Include storage/app/file-manager-pro in the panel's backup if you want version history to survive a server rebuild. The Recycle Bin sits inside each server and is excluded from panel backups automatically.

Disk usage

Two separate things consume space:

• The Recycle Bin lives inside each server, so it counts toward that server's disk limit. It is capped by size and by a share of the disk, whichever is smaller.
• Version storage is separate from the server's disk, with a per-server quota (100 MB by default). Older versions are compressed and only stored once each, so repeated saves cost little.

To see what is being used:

du -sh storage/app/file-manager-pro/*

Monthly checks

1. Confirm the scheduled tasks are registered: php artisan schedule:list | grep file-manager
2. Look for repeated maintenance failures in the panel log.
3. Check the extension's storage size is stable.
4. Spot-check a server: delete a file, restore it from the bin, then edit a config and restore an older version.
5. After a panel upgrade, run php artisan p:extension:doctor . from each extension directory and php artisan optimize:clear.

Selling or limiting history per server

Per-server overrides can be set on the server's admin page, or by a billing system through the Application API. That is useful for selling extended history on a larger plan:

PATCH /api/application/servers/{id}/details
{
  "name": "Survival SMP",
  "user": 1,
  "extensions": {
    "file-manager-pro": { "fmp_version_retention_days": 90, "fmp_version_quota_mb": 500 }
  }
}

Fields: fmp_version_retention_days, fmp_version_quota_mb, fmp_bin_retention_days, fmp_bin_cap_gb, fmp_watcher_enabled. Empty values fall back to the panel-wide settings. Current usage for a server is available from GET /api/application/extensions/file-manager-pro/servers/{id}/usage.

Working with other extensions and themes

• File Manager Pro layers over the panel's file manager view. Another extension layered above it will replace it; layered below, ours is shown.
• Other extensions' toolbar, row-action and selection-action items still render.
• If the extension fails to load, the panel falls back to its own file manager.
• Everything is styled with the panel's theme tokens, so dark, light and custom themes apply. File icon colours can be changed in a theme with CSS variables:

:root {
    --fmp-color-js: #e8d44d;
    --fmp-color-folder: var(--accent);
}

Uninstalling

Uninstalling keeps history and stored versions so a reinstall resumes where it left off. Delete storage/app/file-manager-pro to reclaim that space. Files already in a server's Recycle Bin stay there until removed.