Warnings against using unofficial installers

I was trying to install Pterodactyl, a panel for managing servers for Minecraft, Discord bots, etc, easier. Looking back now, it was stupid of me to use a script to install it. Installing it manually only took me a couple hours anyways.

parkervcp and his team have no official install script for Pterodactyl. Stupidly, I went in search of unofficial install scripts, without realizing that most of them would be deployed on a fresh machine. Can you see where this is going?

It wiped all of my SQL databases. What did these databases contain you ask? Oh nothing, just about 10 domains worth of content including 2 forums and 6 WordPress installs. Stupid, I know. Luckily, all my previous articles, I had decided to publish on this website as well! Dev.to to the rescue!

In the aftermath, I decided that from now on, my articles will be published mainly on dev.to, with links to these articles on my website, onyxcode.net.

Bottom line, if the program doesn't have an installer, do it yourself. Don't go in search of unofficial methods. They could potentially contain malicious code, and you don't always know what deployment conditions they are meant for.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.