Trying it anywhere

The Demo driver lets you run the whole panel on a machine that is not a hosting server: a shared host, a VPS you do not want to hand over, a Windows PC. The panel keeps its own view of accounts, domains, DNS, mailboxes and databases in MySQL, and the File Manager works on real folders under data/demo-home/. Nothing else on the machine is touched.

Use it to learn the panel, to show it to a client, to develop plugins and themes, or to run a public demo site.

What you need

PHP 7.4 or newer with pdo_mysql, curl, json, mbstring, openssl and zip, and a MySQL or MariaDB database you may create tables in. See Requirements.

Put the files in place

1. Unzip the AIOhPanel ZIP into a folder under your web root, for example htdocs/aiohpanel or public_html/panel. The files must sit directly in that folder: index.php, install.php, includes/ and the rest.
2. Make sure the hidden file .htaccess came along. On Apache it blocks the private folders (includes, data, cron, bin, languages, api and the page folders) and sends every other address to index.php.
3. The folder must be writable once, so the wizard can write config.php and create data/.

No web server at hand? From the panel folder you can start PHP's own server and open it in the browser:

php -S 127.0.0.1:2086 -t .

A sub-folder is fine

Nothing assumes the panel lives at /. Put it in public_html/panel/ and it answers at https://example.com/panel/. Every link is built from the folder that holds index.php, and the .htaccess uses relative rules, so no RewriteBase is needed. On Nginx send every address that is not a real file to index.php and block the private folders listed above.

How you reach the three faces

On a real server the port tells the panel which face you want. On a demo host there is one address, so the first part of the path does:

Open the bare address and the panel sends you to /manager/. Inside each face, every link keeps the right prefix by itself.

Run the wizard

Open the folder in the browser. With no config.php the wizard starts. Steps 1 to 5 are described in Installing on a server; the differences are:

• Step 2, Server driver: choose Demo - panel only, nothing on the machine is touched. The wizard writes AP_DRIVER as demo and sets the home folder root to data/demo-home inside the panel folder.
• Step 3, Server hostname: the wizard wants a name like panel.example.com (two dots or more). Type one even though the machine is not that server. The licence is tied to this name.
• Step 4, Licence: works exactly as on a server. Skip it to try the panel with one account.

Then sign in at /manager/ as root.

What is different in Demo

• The driver is named in the Host Manager footer and on the Home page: Demo driver.
• Actions that need a real service (restarting Apache, writing a BIND zone, sending a message through Postfix) are recorded in the panel and answered with a short "(demo)" message.
• Accounts get a folder under data/demo-home/<user>/. The File Manager, the code editor, compress and extract, backups and the Webmail Maildir are all real files.
• Terminal runs only a short list of safe commands (ls, cat, echo, pwd, php, grep, find, du, df and a few more), and does not allow ;, |, && or redirection.
• Site Software writes starter files when it cannot download an application's archive.
• The system user, the virtual host and the PHP-FPM pool of an account do not exist, so a domain you add does not serve a web site.

Moving on to a real server

A demo install cannot be turned into a hosting server by changing one line, because the Linux driver needs the services that install.sh sets up. Install a fresh server as described in Installing on a server. Release the licence from the demo host first, on the Licence page, so the key is free for the new hostname. See The licence key.