CSF future on DirectAdmin — Where do we stand 6 months after the shutdown?

castris

castris

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CSF future on DirectAdmin — Where do we stand 6 months after the shutdown?

It's been almost six months since Way to the Web shut down (August 31, 2025), and I think the DirectAdmin community deserves some clarity on the CSF situation.

Here's what we know so far:

  • cPanel has acted. They announced a maintained GPLv3 fork back in November 2025, with auto-update migration scheduled for February 18, 2026. Clear timeline, clear commitment.
  • DirectAdmin has not. CustomBuild still installs CSF via
    Code: 
    da build set csf yes
    , but there's no public statement about where those packages come from, who maintains them, or what happens next.

cPanel and DirectAdmin share the same parent company (WebPros). So the obvious question is: will DirectAdmin adopt the cPanel fork, or is there a separate plan?

Meanwhile, the community has moved. Several forks are actively maintained:

  • Aetherinox/csf-firewall — Already at v15.08, active development, nftables support in progress, proper documentation at configserver.dev. This is my personal choice for production servers right now.
  • Sentinel Firewall — Community-driven, backed by the OpenPanel team.
  • Centmin Mod and Black-HOST maintain their own mirrors as well.

As sysadmins running DA in production, we need answers to three specific questions:

  1. What is the current update source for CSF when installed via CustomBuild? Is it the original v15.00 frozen, the cPanel fork, or something else?
  2. Is there a commitment to keep CSF as a first-class citizen in DirectAdmin, or should we expect a transition to firewalld/nftables with BFM as the only DA-integrated option?
  3. Will DirectAdmin officially endorse or integrate one of the community forks? The Aetherinox fork in particular has shown serious commitment — signed releases, active bugfixes, and broad panel support (cPanel, DirectAdmin, CyberPanel, Webmin).

The silence is the problem. Those of us managing dozens of DA servers need to make infrastructure decisions now, not "early 2026 maybe." Every month without a clear answer is another month we're running security-critical software with no defined upstream.

I'd love to hear from the DA team, but also from fellow admins: what are you running today? Have you switched forks? Moved to an alternative stack entirely?

30 years in sysadmin. 65+ VPS across OVH and Hetzner. CSF on every single one. This matters.
 
castris said:
cPanel has acted. They announced a maintained GPLv3 fork back in November 2025, with auto-update migration scheduled for February 18, 2026. Clear timeline, clear commitment.
Click to expand...
DA was way before cPanel and cPanel did not even make it to the Februari 18 release as announced, so their RPM's will be updated later, see the corresponding thread at cPanel.

As you could have found on the forum, DA has forked only a few weeks after CSF stopped and also already has brought 2 minor updates.

1.) DA uses their own fork and already has version 15.02
2.) Not fully known yet, however without ipset the current CSF already works with nftables.
3.) Unknown yet, probably there will not be such big cooperation with others, which is also not to expect from other panels.
 
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