How to Add a CAD/MDT to Your FiveM Server with SnailyCAD
If your FiveM server does serious police or EMS roleplay, you need a CAD/MDT — the dispatch, records and mobile-terminal system real departments use. The go-to in the FiveM scene is SnailyCAD, and it's excellent. It's also famously painful to host yourself. Here's the honest rundown.
What SnailyCAD actually gives you
- Dispatch — live call and unit management for your dispatchers.
- MDT — officers run names and plates, log reports and citations.
- Citizen portal — players register characters, licences and vehicles.
- EMS/Fire and court modules for deeper roleplay.
It plugs into your FiveM server so in-game actions and the CAD stay in sync.
Why self-hosting it is a pain
SnailyCAD isn't a drag-and-drop resource. To run it yourself you need to:
- Install Node.js and pnpm, and build a full Next.js app.
- Stand up and connect a PostgreSQL database (not MySQL — this trips a lot of people up).
- Run Prisma database migrations, then keep them updated every version.
- Reverse-proxy it, secure it, and keep it online 24/7.
That's a real sysadmin job, and it's where most community owners get stuck — usually on the Postgres and Prisma steps.
The easy way: managed SnailyCAD
The alternative is managed hosting: the database, the build, the migrations and the uptime are handled for you, and you just get a working CAD with a URL to hand your officers. Set-up drops from an afternoon of troubleshooting to about an hour, done for you.
We host managed SnailyCAD on UK hardware — dispatch, MDT and citizen portal, live and kept updated, so you can get back to actually running your server. See the plans or open a ticket and we'll spin one up.