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The control panel serves both the operator screens and the customer portal. It is a separate process with its own installer and its own environment file.
Install it after the gateway. The gateway owns the database schema; the panel only reads and writes rows in it.It is not on the message path — a panel that is down costs you the ability to make changes, not the ability to send.

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Install

install does Node, service user, directories, source, npm ci, build, environment, systemd unit, and then checks that it answers. It asks for what it needs first and changes nothing until you agree.

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What it derives

Given the gateway’s configuration directory, the installer reads out the operational tokens and the read-only database connection rather than asking you to copy them by hand.
--config-url is never derived. The read-write connection to the configuration tables is the one that can change what customers are charged, so it is always given explicitly.Without it the panel reports every configuration domain as not editable, rather than failing at the first save.

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The operator account is two environment variables

There is no user table.
That is the supported way to change it — it rewrites the environment file and restarts the unit in one step, rather than leaving you to edit a file the installer otherwise promises never to replace.

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The two URLs that are easy to swap

They are different ports carrying different things and sharing no paths. Both failures look like an outage and are not.

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TLS in front

The panel speaks plain HTTP on PORT (3000 by default). Put nginx or similar in front of it, and set AUTH_URL to the public origin — unset, a sign-out redirects to localhost. NODE_ENV=production is set for the build as well as the run, because it decides whether the session cookie is marked secure.

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Customer sign-in needs mail

A customer signs in through a magic link. With FIREFLO_SMTP_HOST or FIREFLO_SMTP_FROM unset, no customer can sign in at all — the portal says the link cannot be sent rather than failing silently, but nobody gets in. See Portal access.

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Upgrading

Replaces the build. Never touches the environment file.
Upgrade the panel and the gateway together. The panel’s version repeats the gateway release it was built against in its first three numbers — 0.7.3.1 pairs with gateway 0.7.3 — and it checks the pair at runtime and says so when they disagree.

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Under a virtualhost

--tenant NAME puts the panel at /srv/fireflo/NAME/panel as unit fireflo-NAME-panel, and the same word names the same instance to the gateway installer. With --vhost PATH the root moves to PATH/panel, with the gateway at PATH/gateway.
Under --vhost, CDR_EXPORT_DIR must sit inside a BindPaths= root. That failure is silent — exports are prepared and then cannot be read.
Every variable is at Control panel environment.