How to Customize robots.txt and security.txt

How to control search engine crawling and publish a security contact for your panel

Both OpenPanel and OpenAdmin ship with a default robots.txt (blocks all crawlers) and a security.txt (an RFC 9116 file that tells security researchers how to report a vulnerability). Each app serves its own pair of files, and each has its own override location — replacing them is a matter of dropping a file on disk, there's no editor built into either panel's UI.

OpenPanel​

Create the file at /etc/openpanel/openpanel/custom_code/robots.txt and/or /etc/openpanel/openpanel/custom_code/security.txt:

nano /etc/openpanel/openpanel/custom_code/robots.txt

The override is only checked once, at startup, so restart the service to apply it:

cd /root && podman-compose up -d openpanel

The same directory also holds the custom code from OpenAdmin > Settings > Custom Code (custom.css, custom.js, in_header.html, in_footer.html) — if you're customizing one you may want the others too; see Branding & White-Label.

OpenAdmin​

Create the file at /usr/local/admin/robots.txt and/or /usr/local/admin/security.txt:

nano /usr/local/admin/security.txt

Unlike OpenPanel, OpenAdmin checks this directory on every request, so the change is live as soon as you save the file — no restart needed.

The same directory also accepts a custom.css override for OpenAdmin's own interface.

Verify​

curl https://yourpanel:2083/robots.txt
curl https://yourpanel:2083/security.txt

Defaults​

If no override file exists, both apps fall back to these built-in defaults.

robots.txt — blocks all crawlers:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

security.txt:

Contact: mailto:[email protected]
Expires: 2030-12-12T11:00:00.000Z
Preferred-Languages: rs, en
Policy: https://github.com/stefanpejcic/OpenPanel/security/policy

Use these as a starting point — at minimum, update Contact and Policy to point at your own security reporting process before publishing your own security.txt.