panel-hardening

Hardening a 3x-ui panel

Read the current state first, change one thing at a time, and know which steps cut your own connection to the panel. Several of these need panel v3.5.0+ (tokens, certificate helpers) or v3.7.0+ (token scopes, get_factory_defaults).

1. Audit what exists

get_settings
list_api_tokens
get_fail2ban_status
get_panel_update_info

get_settings shows the listening port, base path, TLS certificate paths and the subscription settings. A panel on the default port with an empty base path is found by internet-wide scanners within hours; both are worth changing, and both are set in the panel UI rather than through the API.

If you change the base path, this MCP server's XUI_BASE_PATH must change with it or every subsequent call 404s.

2. Move this server off the admin password

A username and password grant everything and cannot be revoked without changing the admin's own credentials. A scoped token can be disabled in one call.

create_api_token name="mcp-server" scope="admin" expires_at=0

The plaintext appears in that response and nowhere else — the panel stores a SHA-256 hash. Capture it, put it in XUI_API_TOKEN, drop XUI_USERNAME and XUI_PASSWORD, restart the server.

Scope admin is what this server needs: monitor reaches only status and metrics routes (of the tools here, just server_status and get_xray_versions), and node-sync is a fixed panel-to-node allowlist. Set expires_at (Unix ms) when the token is for a contractor or a one-off task; leave 0 for the server's own token, since an expiry it cannot renew is an outage waiting to happen.

Note for the CLI: x-ui setting -getApiToken now rotates a single shared cli-fallback token rather than minting a new one, so running it again silently invalidates a token someone is already using. Mint tokens through the API instead.

3. Prune the tokens that exist

list_api_tokens gives id, scope, expiry and enabled state — never values. For anything unrecognised, disable before deleting; disabling is reversible and tells you immediately what breaks: