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GeezerVison is showing captaincore.io — CaptainCore

Open source WordPress fleet management since 2017

Run a fleet of WordPress sites like it was one.

CaptainCore is the toolkit behind Anchor Hosting: a control plane, a command line and the scripts that keep thousands of WordPress sites updated, backed up, monitored and secure. Built in production, MIT licensed, published for anyone who runs sites for a living.

Explore the Manager View on GitHub

3,000 sites at Anchor Hosting Manager + CLI + cookbook MIT licensed

CaptainCore Manager home: fleet counts, needs-attention list, running jobs and pinned sites

3,000 Sites run on it at Anchor Hosting

300 REST routes in the Manager

50+ CLI commands 60+ Remote scripts run over SSH

The toolkit

Five pieces. Use one, or all of them.

The Manager and the CLI are the platform. The rest are the tools that fell out of running it, each useful on its own.

WordPress plugin CaptainCore Manager The control plane. Holds the fleet's state in its own tables, exposes a 300-route REST API, and serves the dashboard every Anchor Hosting customer logs into. PHP · MIT Learn more → Go binary CaptainCore CLI Connects to each site over SSH, runs WP-CLI and bash remote scripts, takes restic backups and git quicksaves, then posts what it found back to the Manager. Go · MIT Learn more → Recipes Cookbook WP-CLI one-liners and bash scripts for the maintenance chores that come up on every site. Run one on a single site or across the whole fleet from the console. WP-CLI · bash Learn more → Bash _do A self-contained collection of command-line utilities for WordPress, pulled straight from the CaptainCore toolkit. One alias, zero install. bash · MIT Learn more → Must-use plugin Analytics Deploys Fathom Analytics to every managed site so traffic shows up in the Manager without another login, another dashboard or another invoice. PHP · Fathom Learn more →

The dashboard

This is the real thing, not a mockup

Screens from CaptainCore Manager as it ships, running a sample fleet of Austin's own sites. The numbers are sample data; the interface is exactly what Anchor Hosting customers use.

Home: what needs attention, what is running, what changed

The Sites list with environment, provider, core version and weekly visits per site

Sites: filter by plugin, theme, core version or label

A site overview: credentials, environment details, domains and accounts

Site overview: credentials, environment, domains, accounts

Site versions tab showing git-style quicksave history with rollback links

Quicksaves: daily version history with rollback

Security page listing vulnerabilities by severity with affected site counts

Security: vulnerabilities, checksums, coverage

A domain DNS editor with A, CNAME, MX and TXT records

DNS: a full zone editor, import and export

The activity dock streaming an update-wp run across several sites

Console: run any command across the fleet, live

How it fits together

Two halves, one contract

The Manager never touches a customer server. It asks the CLI to, then stores and presents what comes back. WordPress stays stateless about credentials; the heavy lifting stays on a dedicated box.

Manager

WordPress plugin

Fleet state in custom tables
REST API + dashboard
Accounts, billing, portals
WP-CLI cron commands

token-authed REST

CLI

Go binary on a server

SSH into every site
Remote scripts + WP-CLI
Restic backups, git quicksaves
Uptime, screenshots, updates

SSH + WP-CLI

Sites

Any host with SSH

Kinsta, WP Engine, Rocket.net
GridPane, anything with WP-CLI
No agent plugin required
Staging and production

POST /wp-json/captaincore/v1/api
{ "token": "…", "command": "sync-data", "site_id": 84, "environment": "Production", "data": { … } }

Every ingest is one token-authed POST. Add a command on the CLI, add a branch in the Manager, done.

The working example

Anchor Hosting runs on it. All of it.

CaptainCore was not built to be a product. It was built so one person could run a managed WordPress host without a support team. Every backup, update, DNS change, invoice and security patch at Anchor Hosting goes through the code on this site, and every customer logs into CaptainCore Manager at anchor.host/account.

Sites under management: 3,000
Customers since 2014: 800+
People on the team: 1
Backups verified: nightly

I publish CaptainCore so other developers can see how a WordPress hosting business actually works under the hood, borrow ideas from it, or run it themselves.

Austin Ginder, Anchor Hosting

See it at anchor.host

The Sites list in card view with a screenshot thumbnail per site

Plugs into

The services a real host already uses

No proprietary agents, no lock-in. CaptainCore wraps the APIs and tools that were already there.

Hosts

Kinsta WP Engine Rocket.net GridPane Any SSH host

Backups

Restic Rclone Backblaze B2

DNS & mail

Constellix Cloudflare Mailgun ForwardEmail

Domains

Hover.com Spaceship

Everything else

WooCommerce Fathom Analytics Missive Envato WP Registry

Cookbook

Recipes you can paste into a terminal today

All recipes →

Show Kinsta PHP Workers Lists out current PHP workers on a site hosted with Kinsta.

ps -e --format "pid uname comm %cpu %mem time" --sort "time" --no-headers | grep php-fpm.* | grep -v "grep" | grep -v "root"

Overriding Recovery Emails Adds RECOVERY_MODE_EMAIL to wp-config.php file. [email protected] + 12 more lines Fetch database autoload size Generally a good idea to keep your database autoload below 1MB in size. You can see the current usage with the following.…

echo "$(wp db query "SELECT ROUND(SUM(LENGTH(option_value))/1024/1024, 2) as autoload_size_MB FROM $(wp db prefix)options WHERE autoload='yes';" --skip-column-names --batch ) MB"

Backing Up WordPress Site Over SSH Paste the following into terminal while connected over SSH. backup() { + 19 more lines

Questions

Things people ask

Is CaptainCore free?

Yes. The Manager and the CLI are MIT licensed on GitHub. _do and the cookbook are free too. There is nothing to buy and no hosted tier.

Can I run it myself?

You can, with a caveat: this is opinionated software built to run one specific hosting business. It assumes a companion CLI server, and parts of it lean on third-party services like Constellix, Kinsta and Mailgun. Expect to read source rather than follow a setup wizard.

Which hosts does it work with?

Any host that gives you SSH and WP-CLI. Provider APIs add extras (site creation, staging, cache purges) for Kinsta, GridPane and Rocket.net. Nothing is installed on the site itself beyond an optional must-use helper.

How is it different from ManageWP or MainWP?

No agent plugin on every site and no vendor in the middle. The CLI talks to sites over SSH, quicksaves are real git commits, backups are restic repositories you own, and the dashboard is a plugin on your own WordPress install. It is the tooling a host uses internally, not a portal sold to hosts.

Where is the documentation?

Right here on this site, written from the source, plus the readme in each repository. The development updates are the story of how it got here.

Who builds it?

Austin Ginder, who also runs Anchor Hosting. CaptainCore is the reason a one-person host can look after three thousand sites.

Take the source for a spin.

Install the Manager on any WordPress site, point a CLI server at it, and you have the same control plane that runs Anchor Hosting. Or just borrow the parts you like.

Read the Manager readme Follow the updates

Install the Manager with WP-CLI

wp plugin install https://github.com/CaptainCore/captaincore-manager/releases/latest/download/captaincore-manager.zip --activate

Install the CLI (Linux and macOS)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CaptainCore/captaincore/master/install.sh | bash

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