Doubts regading personal usage of DirectAdmin for a development environment

J

JuanLUX

New member
Joined
Aug 16, 2026
Messages
3
Hello,

I'm the owner of a website running on a hosting with DirectAdmin for more than 20 years and I'm very happy with it and used to use DA for regular day to day things.
At the same time I'm developing new features for the site on my private development environment (just a single server on my private network at home with no public IP addresses). In order to have my dev environment as similar as the prod one, I'm thinking on getting a DA license for it for managing all the services (MySQL, Nginx, Apache,...) in the same way and having the possibility on getting a full user backup in prod and importing it on dev quite easily

Does this make sense?, Is this possible?, Any recommendation will be welcomed.

Thanks and kind regards
 
My way of doing it is not 100% the same but it follows a similar idea.

I have 2 DA personal plus licenses for 2 servers that I run as prod. (As it is both prod and development testing on prod.)
On those prod servers I have a domain that end with .dev and a domain that end with .com and thus .dev = testing/staging and .com = prod/live. (But if you do not want to use different domains then adding a 2 subdomains would work just fine as well.)

I host my code in my own self-hosted GitLab instance with self-hosted GitLab Runners so I can do CI/CD stuff.
For deploying to .dev and .com I use the build-in GIT module so I can just trigger a fetch & deploy via the DirectAdmin API.
After my CI-CD succeed then I update my .dev site via the runner and a custom DirectAdmin API intergration.
And finally after I merge to master I update the .com and change the .dev to the same master branch until I create a new development branch.
 
Thanks Daniel for your reply and comprehensive explanation, If I have understood you correctly both of your two servers (dev and prod) are using public IP addresses that are routable in Internet because if I'm also correct DirectAdmin doesn't allow to use private IP addresses to tight them to a license. In my case I don't want to expose the dev environment directly to Internet as it can contain unsafe stuff during the development. This is why I want a dev environment "isolated" to be able to test it before going to prod.
 
DirectAdmin does not need a public IP.
Since the DirectAdmin license keys where introduced a couple of years ago, you can use a private nat IP just fine as long as the vm/server can call to license.directadmin.com to validate it.
 
But do I need a fixed IP Public address on my router or a dynamic IP assigned by my ISP is fine?
 
As far as DirectAdmin is concerned your external IP can be 192.168.1.2.
DirectAdmin does not care what it is as long as it can query the licensing domain.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top