How to Set Up txAdmin on a FiveM Server with Ubuntu 24.04

txAdmin is the official management panel for FXServer — the runtime that powers FiveM and RedM servers. It wraps into a single web interface tasks that historically required SSH and manual file editing: live console, scheduled restarts, database backups, admin management, resource monitor, and a guided server template installer.

This tutorial is for anyone setting up their first FiveM server on a Linux VPS and wants to avoid the risky shortcuts (running as root, opening all ports, leaving the panel exposed without a password). The whole process takes between 20 and 30 minutes, depending on your VPS download speed for the artifacts.

The focus is Ubuntu 24.04 LTS because it is the current long-term support release with libraries compatible with recent FXServer builds. Older distributions (Ubuntu 20.04, Debian 11) still work but require adjustments in libssl and glibc that are not covered here.

Prerequisites

Values you will reference throughout the procedure:

Running FXServer as root is a classic attack vector. We will create a dedicated user without administrative privileges.

System Preparation

The first step is to bring the system up to date and install the runtime dependencies that FXServer requires — mainly libssl and xz-utils, the latter needed to decompress the artifacts tarball.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

sudo apt install -y curl wget xz-utils screen libssl-dev ca-certificates ufw

sudo adduser --disabled-password --gecos "" fivem
sudo usermod -aG sudo fivem

Downloading FXServer Artifacts

Artifacts are the official FXServer binaries maintained by Cfx.re. You should always use the recommended version or a recent latest build — older versions have known security bugs.

sudo su - fivem
mkdir -p ~/server ~/server-data
cd ~/server

wget https://runtime.fivem.net/artifacts/fivem/build_proot_linux/master/12913-d4e6759b1c8fa1bdee75e0f87b6e7e2e7b78cd5a/fx.tar.xz

tar xf fx.tar.xz
rm fx.tar.xz

Firewall Configuration

Before starting the server, open only the required ports. Leaving everything open is an unnecessary risk.

exit  # exit the fivem user
sudo ufw default deny incoming
sudo ufw default allow outgoing
sudo ufw allow 22/tcp
sudo ufw allow 30120/tcp
sudo ufw allow 30120/udp
sudo ufw allow 40120/tcp
sudo ufw enable

Starting txAdmin

This is the key step: the FXServer run.sh script starts txAdmin automatically on first run, with no separate installation needed. The web panel appears on port 40120 and generates a unique PIN for the initial setup.

sudo su - fivem
screen -S fivem
cd ~/server
bash run.sh +set serverProfile default

[txAdmin] PIN code is: 1234
[txAdmin] Please open http://your-ip:40120/ on your browser

Verification

The server is working correctly when three things happen simultaneously.

First, in the txAdmin panel, the “Live Console” tab shows active logs with no critical red errors. Yellow warning messages are normal.

Second, the server appears as online in the FiveM public server list at https://servers.fivem.net/ — search by the name configured in server.cfg. It can take up to 5 minutes to propagate.

Third, you can connect using the FiveM client with the direct IP: press F8 in-game and type connect YOUR_IP:30120.

# In SSH, confirm the ports are listening:
sudo ss -tulpn | grep -E '30120|40120'

The expected output shows LISTEN on both ports with FXServer or node as the owning process.

Troubleshooting

txAdmin does not respond in the browser

UFW is likely blocking the port or the service has crashed. Confirm with sudo ufw status that 40120/tcp is allowed. Reattach the screen with screen -r fivem and check whether the process exited with an error. If there is no active screen session, the server is not running — restart it with bash run.sh.

Error “Could not load citizen:/scripting/…”

This usually means the artifacts are corrupted or incomplete. Re-download from the official site — do not use third-party mirrors. Delete the ~/server directory before extracting again to avoid mixing old and new files.

Server does not appear in the public list

Verify that the license key in server.cfg is correct (the sv_licenseKey line). Each key works on one IP at a time — if you reused a key from another server, generate a new one on keymaster.

Next Steps

With txAdmin operational, the following areas are worth exploring:

• Set up a local MySQL/MariaDB instance to support frameworks like ESX and QBCore — without a database, those scripts do not persist player data.
• Add additional admins through the panel (“Players” tab → “Admin Manager”) with granular permissions.
• Configure automatic backups of server-data to external storage. txAdmin has a built-in snapshot feature, but a local-only snapshot does not protect against disk failure.
• Study server.cfg line by line — understanding sv_maxClients, onesync, and sv_scriptHookAllowed prevents insecure configurations inherited from templates.

If you are putting the server into production with real players, a Hostini VPS comes with network-level DDoS protection and NVMe storage — relevant for FiveM because FXServer does heavy random writes to its resource cache.