Cloudflare & proxying

GameDash supports running the panel behind Cloudflare's proxy with no loss of functionality. It is the usual way to keep your host's real address off the public internet, and it puts static assets on a CDN close to your users.

What you get

The origin address is hidden. Traffic reaches Cloudflare, not your panel host directly, which removes the easiest route to attacking it.

DDoS mitigation sits in front of the panel rather than on your own bandwidth.

Static assets are cached at the edge, which noticeably reduces interface load times for users far from your host.

Setting it up

1. Register an account with Cloudflare and add your domain.
2. Follow Cloudflare's own setup instructions to move your nameservers across.
3. Once the domain is active, open the DNS tab and create your records — the web interface, the API and the relay names from Installing the panel.
4. Enable proxying on each record.

That is the whole of it. GameDash needs no configuration change to run behind a proxy.

Nodes are a different matter

Proxy the panel, not your nodes.

Nodes serve game traffic, which is frequently UDP and always latency-sensitive, and the panel needs to reach a node's control ports directly to manage it. Putting a node behind an HTTP proxy breaks both. See Ports & firewall for what actually needs to be reachable and from where.

Restrict node control ports by source address instead — that gets you most of the protection without breaking the control plane.

If the panel stops working after enabling the proxy

The usual causes, in order:

• A record that should not be proxied. Anything that is not HTTP traffic needs to be DNS-only.
• Cookie scope. If sessions stop persisting, check cookie.domain still covers the names you are serving — see Panel configuration.
• The API name is not proxied but the interface is, or the reverse. Keep them consistent.