GIVEAWAY by AdminBolt & RackNerd! 100x FREE VPS FOR A YEAR + 20x LIFETIME LICENSES. LET'S TALK!

dustinc · October 23

@vvvv said:

Thanks @dustinc and the AdminBolt team for the giveaway! Just installed AdminBolt via RackNerd's 1-Click installer.AdminBolt is convenient and fast to better check server status and manage my vps.

Woot woot, let's go!!!!

dustinc · October 23

@canadacoder said:
Lol I'm still trying to win one, I entered multiple times never heard back... Was this even a real thing?!

Hi @canadacoder -- Hahaha, very very real! Most rounds were about watching for my latest giveaway announcement and being among the first eligible participants to complete that round's challenge. Each announcement had its own instructions -- we kept switching things up to keep it fun and diverse (and to keep it human only).

Winners were then contacted via DM.

Check the original post for the overall details on how everything worked, and you'll find plenty of winners throughout this thread sharing their experiences and AdminBolt feedback too!

We'll also be streaming the drawing for the 30 LIFETIME AdminBolt licenses on Monday over on our RackNerdTV YouTube channel!

dustinc · October 23

@lxs647 said:
Big thanks to @dustinc for the giveaway.
I'm so lucky to be one of the winners.
I've been trying out AdminBolt on my new LA VPS, here are my feedbacks:
What I liked:

Installing AdminBolt from One Click Apps in RackNerd ctrl was quick, the panel was up within ~11mins and the login details were clearly laid out.

The UI is clean, user-friendly and understandable, and it's nice that the admin and client areas are separated clearly.

So many security models are ready: SSL, firewall and fail2ban are already configured, so a fresh server isn't left exposed.

Also I had a first glance at the UI and found some minor UI issue below:

when I opend my hosting address: https://<_IP_string_>.myboltip.com:8443/client, I don't know somehow, the search box on home page was prefilled with "admin".

In that case mentioned above, I clicked the "expand icon" behind each menu on the left panel, the left panel will navigate to "phpMyAdmin" menu, instead of expanding the sub menu.

Overall, I like this AdminBolt, it is very easy to use with simple and clear interface. That would be great to keep improving the UI interaction as well as UI regresstion testing alongside adding features.

please refer to the snapshots below:

Awesome, thank you for sharing this @lxs647 -- I believe AdminBolt released an update yesterday to address some UI/UX feedback too. Excited to see how they continue to improve upon the product

dustinc · October 23

@Frobsy said:

@dustinc said:
For the VPS winners who did not yet complete the feedback step, this is your heads up! The cutoff date is:

Friday, Oct 23 at 10 AM Pacific

You must complete the feedback step before this date/time. After this time, feedback entries will not count towards the lifetime AdminBolt licenses drawing.

There will be a total of 20x from the first batch, and 10x from the second batch for a total of 30x lifetime AdminBolt licenses to be given away!

We will announce the winners on YouTube on Monday, Oct 26 at 12 PM Pacific. We'll share the YouTube URL within this thread closer to that time.

Is the adminbolt giveaway for only the vps winners? I've been messing around with it, i'll leave a review later tonight

Hi @Frobsy -- Correct, the lifetime license drawings are for VPS winners who completed the feedback step by the cutoff.

We hope to do more fun stuff with AdminBolt in the future! In the meantime, AdminBolt offers a free 30-day trial for new installs once you confirm your email during onboarding. We'd still love to hear how it's working out for you -- appreciate you sharing your experience!

dustinc · October 23

@Chalipa said:
Thanks to @dustinc for the giveaway!

I'm one of the winners and have been using AdminBolt for a few days now. The installation was pretty quick, and I was honestly surprised by how good the panel is. It's also good to see that it's audited by Rack911, which is a well-known name in security.

Here are a few things I think could be improved:

I think the login URL should be the same for admins, resellers and users instead of having different URLs for each level.

The mail sending logs could be a bit more detailed, so it's easier to see what's going on when a system email is sent.

It would be nice to have an option to use an external mail service, such as Google Workspace, for sending system emails.

Adding new PHP extensions could be improved as well. At the moment, there are quite limited options available to install directly through AdminBolt.

Hi @Chalipa -- Coming from a hosting industry veteran like you, this is great to hear! Appreciate you spending a few days with it and sharing your suggestions -- I'm sure the AdminBolt team does too.

Agreed on Rack911Labs -- a familiar and respected name in hosting security, and their involvement gives us additional confidence in AdminBolt as well.

dustinc · October 23

@Chris_AdminBolt said:
Hey all, we released AdminBolt 1.9.3 yesterday, and a lot of what shipped came out of this thread. Dropping a quick note so you can see what landed and what's still on the list.

From your feedback here, now in 1.9.3

One design language, neutral dark theme. Several of you (@averagedatahoarder, @buggedout, @Andru, @morgan44, @sh97) called out the AI-slop / mixed-feel look. The whole panel now runs on one typeface (Outfit, no monospace, no letter-spacing), tables and cards and the topbar share one black (#0a0a0a), hover washes are white instead of amber, and the buttons no longer lift or shimmer on hover. Hover now only brightens. Light theme is unchanged.

Client Home on a phone. @mzltest's screenshot of cards running past the right edge at ~320 px: the grid is now grid-cols-1 below lg with min-w-0 columns, and the AI chat input shrinks instead of pushing. Checked at 320 / 360 / 375 / 390.

DNS Health badge actually reads. @subkii, the "Issues Found" header with an untranslated "1 errors" badge is gone. It now says "1 issue found" / "2 issues found", with ru/pl/de/ja plurals.

Menu shows where you are. The group that contains the open page gets the active colour, so a collapsed group still tells you where you are, in all three panels (admin, reseller, client).

Dashboard arrows. The trend ↑/↓ on the metrics cards and the → arrows after card links and update-card buttons are heroicons now, not glyphs, so everything on the dashboard sits in one icon family.

Flat Quick Actions. Icon-square + label rows, left-aligned, instead of bordered centred tiles.

Nodes page. /admin/cluster/nodes had no way to add a node. With hub mode on, there's a Connect Node action and an empty state; with hub mode off, there's an "Enable hub mode" shortcut that goes to Hub Settings.

Addon Domains count. The counter no longer includes the account's main domain, in Usage details, the hosting accounts list, the client dashboard, Refresh Data and the APIs. A plan set to N now lets you add N domains besides the main one. (0 still means unlimited.) Existing plan values stay as they are, so every plan effectively allows one more domain than before.

New Settings tabs.

Security: session lifetime, require 2FA for administrators / resellers / clients, and an admin-panel IP allowlist (must include your own address; CLI escape hatch is bolt-php /usr/local/bolt/web/artisan panel:admin-ip-allowlist --clear). This is the thing @stayforu and @PuDLeZ were asking about.

Security" />

Support: adds your support URL, email, phone and Terms/Privacy to the client login page and the footer across all three panels.

Branding: colour schemes for light and dark theme, corner-radius style, font, sidebar width per panel, and an uploaded logo that is fitted without cropping.

Branding" />

A few other things that went in that weren't strictly LET-driven but a few of you asked about:

Real-time malware scanning via bolt-livescan. Files written to a site are handed to ImunifyAV within seconds, and the upgrade sets it up where ImunifyAV is already installed. One malware history and quarantine per account, across engines (ImunifyAV, cPGuard, etc.).

Backup archive import. Bring an account in from a plain backup archive, without needing the source panel.

Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud. Backups > Acronis sets up a daily protection plan, administrators and (with the plan feature) resellers and clients can restore account files, databases, mailboxes, domains or the whole account.

Remote mail servers. Mail runs on a separate box; when an account's mail server changes, its MX, mail SRV, mail.<domain> and DKIM records and mail autodiscovery follow. Hand-edited records stay as they are.

Health > Security page + cPGuard client plugin.

Health in the admin's language across every page, dashboard attention card and mail/web server dashboards.

Full changelog: https://docs.adminbolt.com/changelog/1.9.3

Still on the list

Things people called out that aren't in 1.9.3 but are on the way:

Multi-OS installer (Debian/Ubuntu): on the roadmap. @raindog308, @Tandoor, @pwned, @wrenn, @lyser, @JasonM, still no date, honest answer.

DKIM for myboltip subdomains signed by the subdomain, not the parent (@pwned, @subkii): scheduled.

File Manager: "backend error" on first open (@pwned); 403 opening a file in the editor (@GenerallyClueless). Queued.

Email-login from the onboarding card (@ashish168527): queued.

WordPress installer picking up a placeholder index.php on default settings (@subkii): being changed.

Certificate for IP so the first visit after the install doesn't throw a warning (@PuDLeZ, @stayforu, @hahaha521 and others): queued.

Password strength meter flagging aaabbb111 / abcd@1234 as strong (@tansel, @rumpum): fix queued.

PHP-FPM pools lazy-load / idle memory (@Bingwu, @morgan44, @rumpum): looking at it.

Collapsible sidebar (@Insomnium, @JasonM): coming.

Replies to recent posts

@lxs647: thanks for the screenshots. Both reproduce: the Home search box picks up "admin" as a stuck form value, and the sidebar chevron, when the group is collapsed, navigates to the first child instead of expanding. The chevron behaviour is a deliberate "no dead click" fallback, but on a target that reads as expand it is wrong. We'll make the chevron expand/collapse only, and keep the row click for navigate. Home prefill: fix queued.

@Chalipa: four good points.

Unified login URL for admin/reseller/client. By design each panel has its own URL so that a reachable client URL cannot be walked to the admin login. The admin IP allowlist in 1.9.3 (Settings > Security) is the lever for that side.

More detailed mail-sending logs. Today Health > Mail Server shows deliveries and the Postfix queue; detailed per-message tracing is on the backlog.

External SMTP for system mail. Not today, the server sends through its own Postfix. Noted, it has come up a few times.

More PHP extensions in-panel. We install from PECL plus the Remi/CloudLinux set. What's missing for you? Happy to look at adding popular ones.

@JasonM / @lyser: collapsible sidebar coming (@Insomnium asked for it too). Ubuntu: multi-OS is on the roadmap, no date. The installer error you hit, @lyser, will name AL9/Rocky 9 up front instead of waiting for the first stage to blow.

@ehab: glad the panel feels snappy. "Mail stays in queue" on a fresh server is almost always reverse DNS plus no sender reputation; the hostname card in 1.9.3 shows reverse DNS as part of one block, and the per-domain DKIM/SPF/DMARC check is on Health > Mail. If you can share a specific queue message or recipient, we'll look.

Thanks everyone. Real-world feedback like this is the thing that moves the panel.

Thank You @Chris_AdminBolt for listening to the community and turning so much of that feedback into actual changes! Seeing people’s suggestions here make it into a release already is refreshing. I know I appreciate it, and I’m sure many others here do too.

IMO that direct connection between developers and users gets lost far too often as companies become more corporate and VC driven. This reminds me of what many of us appreciated about the earlier days of hosting panels -- people passionate about the industry, listening and building alongside their users.

Please keep that connection as AdminBolt grows! It gives us a lot of confidence in where you're headed 👊

dustinc · October 23

@PuDLeZ said:

@Chris_AdminBolt said:
Thanks everyone. Real-world feedback like this is the thing that moves the panel.

With php2shell, I think it shows the importance of when I said it shouldn't install EOL/EOS versions by default so someone is forced to "manually" get those versions with a warning. Though the emails about it was nice!

Got those emails too -- good to see the AdminBolt team was on top of it

dustinc · October 23

@harrison said:
@Chris_AdminBolt
checking v1.9.3:

Personally, I'm not a big fan of big help icons in lower-right side of screen but it's fine.

The UI/UX ,all-around looks polished.

It's better to add a hide/show toggle button to the left menu pane.

On server, there are two shell scripts on root's home: adminbolt-install.sh and adminbolt-installer.sh. It's not clear what the user (admin) should do with these two?

The style of script is not very readable to me. For example check report_step_class function.

I recommend doing a shellcheck on adminbolt-installer.sh:
$ shellcheck adminbolt-installer.sh

In adminbolt-installer.sh line 29:
readonly POST_INSTALL_DB_PATH="/var/lib/adminbolt/db.sqlite3"
         ^------------------^ SC2034 (warning): POST_INSTALL_DB_PATH appears unused. Verify use (or export if used externally).


In adminbolt-installer.sh line 1040:
    for cmd in curl; do
               ^--^ SC2043 (warning): This loop will only ever run once. Bad quoting or missing glob/expansion?


In adminbolt-installer.sh line 1057:
    . /etc/os-release
      ^-------------^ SC1091 (info): Not following: /etc/os-release was not specified as input (see shellcheck -x).


In adminbolt-installer.sh line 1448:
    local SSO_URL=$(bolt-cli admin-sso-generate 2>/dev/null || echo "")
          ^-----^ SC2155 (warning): Declare and assign separately to avoid masking return values.


In adminbolt-installer.sh line 1449:
    [ -z "${SSO_URL}" ] && echo -e "${YELLOW}WARNING:${NC} SSO URL not generated" || print_success "SSO URL generated"
                        ^-- SC2015 (info): Note that A && B || C is not if-then-else. C may run when A is true.

Thank You @harrison -- appreciate you checking out the new release and digging into the installer too! Good to hear the UI feels more polished.

Tagging @Chris_AdminBolt for your suggestions and installer findings, thanks for including specific examples for the team to review!

Chris_AdminBolt · October 23

@harrison thanks for going through 1.9.3 and the installer.

The two scripts in root's home are both copies of the installer left over from setup. Nothing uses them once the panel is running, so you can delete both. We'll stop leaving them there.
Shellcheck on the current installer gives exactly the five you listed: three warnings and two notes, none of which changes what the install does. We'll clean them up.
Hide/show for the left menu isn't in 1.9.3. Same ask as @JasonM and @Insomnium, it's on the list.
Help icon, noted - i hope not everyone will hate it

@PuDLeZ agreed. Installing only supported PHP versions by default, with end-of-life ones as an opt-in behind a warning, is in review for the next release. Glad the emails helped.

@averagedatahoarder thanks for flagging it. We don't see any errors on the demo around your post and it answers normally now. If it fails again, tell us what you saw (error page, blank page or rejected login) and roughly when, and we'll trace it.

As always, shoutout to @dustinc for keeping thread alive!

Have a nice weekend everyone and keep Bolting! ⚡ ;-)