3x-ui/deploy/marketplace/hetzner

3x-ui on Hetzner Cloud

Hetzner Cloud does not have a third-party image marketplace the way AWS does. There are two practical ways to ship 3x-ui on Hetzner.

Option A — cloud-init (recommended, no image build)

Use the generic user-data from ../../cloud-init/. It installs 3x-ui non-interactively and generates unique per-instance credentials.

Web console: Create Server → Cloud config → paste deploy/cloud-init/cloud-init.yaml.

CLI:

hcloud server create \
  --name xui-1 \
  --type cx22 \
  --image ubuntu-24.04 \
  --user-data-from-file deploy/cloud-init/cloud-init.yaml

After boot, fetch the generated credentials:

ssh root@<server-ip> 'cat /etc/x-ui/install-result.env'

Option B — snapshot from the qcow2 / a configured server

Hetzner lets you create a snapshot of a running server and launch new servers from it. Two ways to get there:

1. From the Packer qcow2: Hetzner does not allow direct qcow2 upload via the normal API, but you can boot a server, write the image to its disk in rescue mode, then take a snapshot — or simply use Option A, which needs no image.

2. From a configured server: spin up a server, install via cloud-init (Option A), verify, then delete /etc/x-ui/x-ui.db and the first-boot sentinel before snapshotting so clones regenerate their own credentials:

   systemctl stop x-ui
   rm -f /etc/x-ui/x-ui.db /etc/x-ui/.firstboot-done /etc/x-ui/credentials.txt
   # re-enable first-boot regeneration if you installed via Packer:
   systemctl enable x-ui-firstboot 2>/dev/null || true
   

⚠️ If you snapshot a server with its x-ui.db, every clone shares the same admin credentials and session secret. Always remove the DB first.

"App"-style listing

Hetzner's curated apps live in the community repo github.com/hetznercloud/apps: each app is essentially a documented cloud-init config plus metadata. To propose 3x-ui as a Hetzner app, follow that repo's contribution pattern and base the app's cloud-config on deploy/cloud-init/cloud-init.yaml.