One of Strapi's main feature is its fully extendable and customizable admin panel. This section explains how the admin panel section is structured and how to customize it.
See the [Contributing Guide](https://github.com/strapi/strapi/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md) for information on how to contribute to Strapi's admin interface.
By default, the administration panel is exposed via [http://localhost:1337/admin](http://localhost:1337/admin). However, for security reasons, you can easily update this path.
**Path —** `./config/environment/**/server.json`.
```json
{
"host": "localhost",
"port": 1337,
"cron": {
"enabled": false
},
"admin": {
"path": "/dashboard"
}
}
```
The panel will be available through [http://localhost:1337/dashboard](http://localhost:1337/dashboard) with the configurations above.
For example, to change the top-left displayed admin panel's color, `./node_modules/strapi-admin/admin/src/components/LeftMenuHeader/styles.scss` should be overriden by `./admin/src/components/LeftMenuHeader/styles.scss` with your own styles.
Thus, you are replacing the files that would normally be in `node_modules/strapi-admin/admin/src` and directing them to `admin/src/some/file/path`.
To apply your changes you need to rebuild your admin panel
you can build your admin panel with a specific configuration (located in the `./config/environments/**/server.json`) config by specifying a NODE_ENV as follows:
This will replace the folder's content located at `./build`. Visit http://localhost:1337/admin/ to make sure your updates have been taken into account.
The administration is nothing more than a React front-end application calling an API. The front-end and the back-end are independent and can be deployed on different servers which brings us to different scenarios:
1. Deploy the entire project on the same server.
2. Deploy the administration panel on another server (AWS S3, Azure, etc) than the API.
Let's dive into the build configurations for each case.
#### Deploy the entire project on the same server.
You don't need to touch anything in your configuration file. This is the default behavior and the build configurations will be automatically set. The server will start on the defined port and the administration panel will be accessible through http://yourdomain.com:1337/dashboard.