Operate your server with txAdmin

Open the dashboard and read the heartbeat

Open your browser to the dashboard:

http://localhost:40120

Confirm the top-left badge is green and says Server Online. In the left sidebar, click Live Console. You'll see a black terminal scrolling text. Every line FXServer prints, you read here. At the bottom is an input box. Type this and press Enter:

status

status is a command built into FXServer itself. It prints the list of connected players: server ID, primary identifier, name, endpoint, and ping. An identifier is a unique tag tied to one player, like their Steam account or their FiveM account. With no players connected the list is empty. That empty reply is still your server answering you live.

Color codes matter. White is info, yellow is a warning, red is an error. If you see red, copy the line and search it. Most red lines are typos in server.cfg or a bad fxmanifest.lua. The fxmanifest.lua is the small text file at the root of every resource that tells the server what files to load.

The Live Console is how you talk to a running server without restarting it.

Find a player in the Players panel

In the left sidebar, click Players, then the Online tab. It lists everyone connected right now. That includes you, once you join later in this lesson. Click any name to open the Player Modal. This is where day-to-day moderation lives:

Info -> identifiers: fivem:, steam:, discord:, license:
History -> past warnings, kicks, bans
IDs -> hardware IDs, for ban-evasion checks
Actions -> Warn / Kick / Ban / DM, each with a reason field

The Info tab is the one you'll use most. When you connect to your own server later, click your own name and copy the fivem: value. That value is what you paste into the admin line in server.cfg:

add_principal identifier.fivem:1234567 group.admin

That line is an ACE rule. ACE is FiveM's permission system. A principal is who the rule applies to (here, a player by identifier). The rule grants that principal the group.admin role, which unlocks admin commands. Put it near the end of server.cfg, or in a permissions.cfg you exec (the annotated server.cfg lesson shows this). This is how you make yourself an admin in the game.

Restart resources: the Resources tab and ensure / restart / refresh

In the left sidebar, click Resources. A resource is one folder of script, like a single mod. Each row is one resource. A green dot means running, grey means stopped, red means crashed. Hover a row to reveal Start, Stop, and Restart. The Refresh List button at the top re-scans the resources/ folder for new files you dropped in.

The core developer loop is simple. Edit a script. Save it. Click Restart on that one resource. Alt-tab back into the game. No full server restart needed. You can also do the same three jobs from the Live Console or the FXServer server console. They are server commands; they do not run from a normal player's F8 client console.

ensure my-resource

ensure starts the resource if it is stopped, and restarts it if it is already running. This is the line you put in server.cfg for every resource you want running at boot. It is the safe re-bounce.

restart my-resource

restart stops then starts a running resource in one step. It never leaves the resource off in between. Use it after you edit a Lua or JS file. Do not type stop then start as two separate commands, because that leaves a window where the resource is dead.

refresh

refresh re-scans the resources/ folder for new sub-folders. It does not start anything on its own. After you drop in a brand-new resource folder, run refresh first, then ensure my-resource.

The one distinction that trips up beginners: ensure is what you write in server.cfg to bring a resource up at boot. restart is what you type at runtime to reload it after an edit. Same family, different moment. When in doubt at runtime, ensure my-resource also works, because it restarts a resource that is already running.

Try it on a resource that already ships with your server. chat ships with recipe deployments; if you do not have it, pick any running resource from the Resources list and use its name instead:

restart chat

Restarting one resource is fast. Restarting the whole server kicks everyone off, so avoid it unless you must.

Understand recipes (and when to use one)

Recipes are not a standing panel in the sidebar. You meet them once, during first-time setup, inside the Server Deployer (the wizard you ran in Step 03). A recipe is a setup file. It tells txAdmin to download a list of resources, drop them in resources/, and add the matching ensure lines to server.cfg. An ensure line is the command that loads a resource when the server boots. One recipe click builds a working server preset.

The Deployer's built-in recipe list is CFX Default, QBCore Framework, and ESX Legacy. Qbox is a maintained recipe too, but it is not in the built-in list; you deploy it via its remote recipe URL as an advanced step. Qbox is an ox-based QBCore fork you can move to later. Choose based on the framework docs and the requirements of the scripts you plan to install.

Recipes are one-time scaffolds. Use one to create a new server, never to update an existing one. Running a second recipe on a working server overwrites your server.cfg and you lose your customizations.

Edit server.cfg from the browser with the CFG Editor

In the left sidebar, click CFG Editor (it is its own page, not a tab inside Settings). Your full server.cfg opens in a Monaco editor. That is the same editor engine VS Code uses. Scroll to your admin line and confirm your resources are ensured:

ensure chat
ensure my_first_resource

Edit, then click Save. If a change needs a full restart, txAdmin tells you, and you click the Server Restart button at the top-right. This editor is the cleanest way to edit a server that runs on a remote box. No SSH, no FileZilla, just a password-protected web tab. SSH is a secure remote-login tool; FileZilla is a file-transfer app. You skip both with the CFG Editor.

Set Privacy to Hidden, then open the in-game txAdmin menu

Still in Settings, open the Game Mode & Privacy area. While you're learning, set Server Privacy to Hidden. A hidden server is not listed in the FiveM server browser. Players reach it only through Direct Connect. Flip to Public when you're ready to advertise. The Game Mode label (Roleplay, Drift, Sandbox) is the tag shown next to your server in the browser. Click Save.

Now the in-game menu. Once you connect later in this lesson, you can open the txAdmin menu three ways.

First way: type /tx or /txadmin in the chat box.

Second way: press F8 to open the in-game client console (a black bar that drops down from the top of the screen), then type tx and press Enter. In the F8 console you type commands with no leading slash, so tx here is the same registered command as /tx typed in chat.

Third way: bind a key. In the FiveM client open Settings > Key Bindings > FiveM and set (txAdmin) Menu: Open Main Page to any key you like. The menu has no default key, so it stays command-only until you bind one.

The menu gives you teleport, a vehicle spawner, weather and time, and player actions. It is enabled by default.

One catch on access. The menu is gated by txAdmin's own account system, not by the ACE group.admin rule from Step 2. Only a txAdmin admin account with its Discord or Cfx.re identifier linked can open it. You link that in the Admin Manager (its own sidebar page). If neither identifier is attached to your account, the menu will not open. The add_principal ACE line controls console and chat-command permissions. The in-game menu is a separate gate. Both can apply to you at once.

Connect to your own server

Your server is already running through txAdmin. Now join it from the game client.

1. Open the FiveM client.
2. Top tab, click Play.
3. Right side, click Direct Connect.
4. Type the address below in the bar, then click Connect.

localhost

The first connect downloads any resources your server added, so the loading screen takes a moment. localhost means "this same computer". You run the server and the client on one PC, so the client looks for the server right here. Real players join later with your public IP or a Cfx.re join code.

Your Cfx.re license key in server.cfg is a secret. Never paste it in chat, never screenshot it, never commit it to Git. Exposing your public IP or opening the game port (default 30120) lets strangers try to connect, so only do that behind a firewall once you understand it.

Read the server console one line at a time

Open txAdmin, then Live Console. The sample lines below are illustrative. Your real lines will name your own resources and players. Read them top to bottom:

[ info] Console: Resource scoreboard started.
[ info] Player [Kishi] connected from 127.0.0.1.
[ warn] CFX: dependency 'es_extended' not found, scoreboard may misbehave
[ error] SCRIPT ERROR: @scoreboard/cl_score.lua:42: attempt to index a nil value (global 'PlayerData')
stack traceback:
@scoreboard/cl_score.lua:42: in function <@scoreboard/cl_score.lua:40>

How to read them:

• info (white) is FYI. A resource started, a player joined, nothing is wrong.
• warn (yellow) means "you should know". The server still runs, but something is off, like a missing dependency or a deprecated API.
• error (red) means something broke. It almost always names the file and the line number. Open that file, read that line, fix it.
• stack traceback is the call chain. The top line is where it actually broke. The lines under it are who called it.

Triage rule: red before yellow before white. One error often cascades into many warnings, so fix the topmost red line first and the warnings frequently disappear with it.

Loop-closing cross-check: now that you have joined, confirm you show up in two places at once. Open the txAdmin Players panel and find your name there, then run status in the Live Console and find the same name in its output. Two views, one you.

Find the logs on disk

The Live Console only keeps the most recent output. Older history is written to disk by txAdmin under txData/<profile>/. The <profile> part is the name of your txAdmin data profile, which is default unless the server owner set a custom one. The log folders are:

txData/<profile>/logs/fxserver/   full FXServer console rolling log
txData/<profile>/logs/admin/      admin actions: kick, ban, restarts
txData/<profile>/logs/server/     server-side script and event logs

If you started txAdmin with a different profile or moved your data folder, the path shifts. The reliable move is to search for it. On Windows, run this in PowerShell from your server folder:

Get-ChildItem -Recurse -Directory -Filter logs -Path .\txData

If you would rather not use a terminal, open txData in File Explorer and drill into your profile folder, then logs.

On macOS or Linux:

find . -type d -path "*txData*/logs*"

Run the edit, restart, observe loop

Every script change from now on follows the same three beats. Practice it once on a resource you own: qu_dep_provider from Step 04.

1. Edit any .lua file inside qu_dep_provider in VS Code and save with Ctrl+S. Do not edit the bundled chat resource for this exercise; it belongs to the server base and you should leave it alone.
2. Restart the resource. Two ways:

restart qu_dep_provider

Or in txAdmin, open the Resources tab and click Restart on the row.

3. Observe. Watch the Live Console for the lifecycle lines, then trigger the feature you changed to confirm it works. If you only want to practise the command safely, restart qu_dep_provider without editing it.

Recover from a bad edit: if a red error line appears after you restart, your last edit broke something. Undo it in VS Code with Ctrl+Z, save again with Ctrl+S, and run restart my-resource once more. The error should clear.

Keep VS Code on the left half of your screen and the Live Console on the right half. You edit on the left, save, and watch the right side react with no alt-tab.