Warm greetings for the new year. 

Here’s a brief overview of what we shipped in 2025 and what’s coming next in 2026.
We introduced the EasyEngine Dashboard—a brand-new way to handle all your clients’ servers and sites from one place, and we also rolled out solid updates to the EasyEngine CLI. 

This year, we made managing WordPress sites easier and more unified for agencies, developers, and teams. Here’s what we released and why it matters.

EasyEngine Dashboard Highlights

There are plenty of big and small features we launched this year; below are top-level highlights of all the major features: 

• Unified Dashboard: Manage all your servers and sites (AWS, Hetzner, DigitalOcean, and WP Cloud) from one place; no more switching between providers.
• WP Cloud Integration: If you have a WP Cloud API key, you can create and manage WP Cloud WordPress sites directly from the dashboard.
• Server & Site Management: Connect your cloud providers or import existing Ubuntu servers to add and manage WordPress, PHP, and HTML sites easily.
• Team Access Control: Invite team members and assign roles like Admin, Manager, and Member to control who can do what. 
• Activity Log: Track all changes made by team members on sites or servers. The activity log records every action taken in the dashboard, giving owners clear visibility into who did what.
• Backups & Restore: Connect any S3-compatible storage to automate or manually run backups for each site. Easily store and manage backups off-server for extra safety.
• Performance & CI/CD: Connect to New Relic for performance monitoring and use built-in Nginx and Redis for speed. Deploy safely with GitHub-based CI/CD and add SSH keys to your sites for streamlined deployments.
• Firewall & Live Logs: View real-time NGINX, PHP, and WordPress logs per site to debug issues; download logs when needed. Enable firewall protection on servers, and manage IP whitelisting or blacklisting directly from the dashboard.

Explore all the features of the EasyEngine Dashboard

EasyEngine CLI Highlights

• PHP 8.5 Support: Added compatibility for PHP 8.5. You can now create new sites with PHP 8.5 or update existing sites to use it.
• CLI Releases: Throughout the year, we shipped multiple CLI updates improving stability, backup reliability, and performance. For more details, read the full CLI release notes here.

What’s Coming in 2026

White-label & reseller workflows to manage clients, sites, and infrastructure from a branded dashboard.

• Faster and safer operations with incremental backups, better visibility, alerts, vulnerability detection, automatic WordPress updates, and Redis cache plugin support.
• Deeper WP Cloud support for staging environments, CI/CD, and clearer visibility around WP Cloud site usage.
• Simpler billing for agencies with multi-organization support, flexible yearly plans and add-ons, real-time plan updates, and clearer invoices and payment notifications.

Links

• Explore all the features of the EasyEngine Dashboard
• Get started with the EasyEngine Dashboard
• Learn how EasyEngine Dashboard works with WP Cloud
• Connect your first server to the EasyEngine Dashboard
• Sign up with the free plan

The post EasyEngine: Year in Review 2025 appeared first on EasyEngine.

Hello there! 👋

We’re excited to announce a series of six releases for EasyEngine – versions 4.9.0 through 4.10.1. These releases, spanning from July to December 2025, bring some highly anticipated features and significant improvements to the platform.

The highlight? Native backup and restore functionality, PHP 8.5 support, and improved integration with EasyEngine Dashboard. Let’s dive in!

Features Added 🛠️

Site Backup & Restore 💾

One of the most requested features is finally here! EasyEngine now has native backup and restore functionality built right in.

You can now backup and restore your sites with simple commands:

# Backup a site
ee site backup example.com

# List all backups for a site
ee site backup example.com --list

# Restore a site from backup
ee site restore example.com --backup-id=<backup-id>

The backup feature is comprehensive and includes:

• Database dumps
• WordPress content (uploads, plugins, themes)
• Nginx configuration
• PHP configuration
• Custom docker-compose files (if any)

Automatic Backup Retention – By default, EasyEngine keeps the 7 most recent backups for each site and automatically deletes older ones. You can customize this number based on your needs:

# Set number of backups to keep (default: 7)
ee config set no-of-backups 10

# Check current setting if setup (default is 7 if no config set)
ee config get no-of-backups

PHP 8.5 Support ⚙️

PHP 8.5 is here, and EasyEngine is ready for it! You can now create new sites with PHP 8.5 or update existing sites to use it.

# Create new site with PHP 8.5
ee site create example.com --type=wp --php=8.5

# Update existing site to PHP 8.5
ee site update example.com --php=8.5

This keeps EasyEngine at the cutting edge, allowing you to test and deploy with the latest PHP version as soon as it’s available.

Default PHP Version Now 8.3 🔄

Starting with v4.9.1, all new WordPress sites will use PHP 8.3 by default instead of PHP 8.2. This change ensures that new sites benefit from the latest stable PHP features and performance improvements out of the box.

Your existing sites remain unaffected – they’ll continue running on their current PHP version until you explicitly update them.

In the coming weeks, we plan to make PHP 8.4 the default for new sites.

SSL Management Enhancements 🔒

We’ve made several improvements to SSL management that make working with certificates much easier:

Default Self-Signed Certificates – EasyEngine now automatically generates a default self-signed certificate for the nginx-proxy. This means unconfigured domains will show a branded error page instead of a generic 503 error or redirecting to any other site setup on server. Much better user experience!

New ssl-info Command – Need to check your SSL certificate details or get DNS challenge records for verification? The new ssl-info command has you covered:

# View SSL certificate details
ee site ssl-info example.com

# Get DNS challenge records (for DNS-01 verification)
ee site ssl-info example.com --get-dns-records

This command shows detailed certificate information including issuer, validity period, serial number, and SANs (Subject Alternative Names). It’s especially useful when you’re setting up wildcard certificates using DNS-01 challenges.

Better SSL Error Handling – We’ve fixed issues with site deletion when SSL certificates aren’t issued, and improved redirect handling for non-SSL sites.

EasyEngine Dashboard Integration 🌐

For users of EasyEngine Dashboard, we’ve added improved integration that makes managing multiple servers even easier:

Async Backup Callbacks – When EasyEngine Dashboard triggers a backup, it now receives detailed callbacks about backup success or failure.

Error Tracking – Failed backups are automatically reported to the Dashboard with detailed error information, making it easy to identify and troubleshoot issues across your fleet of servers.

Retry Logic – We’ve implemented smart retry logic for API requests to handle temporary network issues. The system retries 5xx server errors, connection errors, DNS failures, and timeouts (up to 3 retries with 5-minute delays) but doesn’t retry 4xx client errors.

Version Reporting – EasyEngine now reports its version to the Dashboard, making it easier to track which servers need updates.

Config Command Improvements ⚙️

Managing EasyEngine configuration just got easier with new commands:

# List all config values
ee config list

# List in different formats
ee config list --format=json
ee config list --format=yaml

# Unset a config value
ee config unset cloudflare-api-key

These commands give you better visibility and control over your EasyEngine configuration.

Performance Improvements ⚡

Concurrent Docker Image Pulls

EasyEngine updates now pull Docker images concurrently during migrations, significantly reducing update time especially when multiple images need updating.

Improved JSON Output

We’ve enhanced JSON output formatting across commands, making it easier to parse EasyEngine output in scripts and automation workflows.

Stack Updates 📦

We’ve updated several core components to their latest versions:

Major Updates:

• Redis: 7.4.2 → 8.4.0 – Major version upgrade with significant performance enhancements
• Nginx-proxy: 1.7.1 → 1.9.0 – Updated to latest version

PHP Version Updates:

• PHP 8.1: 8.1.31 → 8.1.33
• PHP 8.2: 8.2.27 → 8.2.29
• PHP 8.3: 8.3.16 → 8.3.28
• PHP 8.4: 8.4.10 → 8.4.15

Other Updates:

• Debian (Postfix): 12.9-slim → 13.2-slim
• Alpine (NewRelic Daemon): 3.21.2 → 3.23.0
• Ofelia (Cron): 0.3.15 → 0.3.19

Notable Bugfixes 🐛🚫

Clone Command wp-config Preservation

Fixed a bug where ee site clone would overwrite the local wp-config.php file when cloning from a remote site with a custom public directory. The clone command now properly excludes wp-config.php regardless of the directory structure.

Database Import Improvements

Updated database import commands along with adding the --skip-ssl option for both export and import operations. This resolves issues with database operations in updated mariadb 10.11+ containers.

Site Deletion SSL Fixes

Resolved issues where site was deleted if SSL certificates weren’t properly issued, and improved handling of SSL-related cleanup during site removal.

Update to the Latest Version

Fire the EasyEngine update command to update to the latest version:

ee cli update

For a detailed breakdown of all changes, check out the release notes on GitHub:

• v4.9.0
• v4.9.1
• v4.9.2
• v4.9.3
• v4.10.0
• v4.10.1

Links: Documentation | GitHub

The post EasyEngine v4.9.0-v4.10.1 Released appeared first on EasyEngine.

Since we launched EasyEngine Command Line Interface (CLI) in 2014, one of the most requested features has been a web interface to manage WordPress sites and servers.

After powering 75000+ WordPress sites across the world through the CLI, we’re excited finally to launch EasyEngine Dashboard, a modern web interface built for developers, agencies, indie hackers, and teams who want the same EasyEngine power but without the command-line overhead.

Why We Built It

While originally people wanted just a web interface, many other features, such as team collaboration, backups, and monitoring, were cumbersome to use via command line and hence remain in our backlog.

So we started building a web dashboard internally at rtCamp to solve our needs. Every day we have hundreds of WordPress sites to manage for our more than 200 employees. A web interface with added features (explained below) has reduced our system team’s workload dramatically.

What happens to the EE CLI version?

Our commitment to open source remains unchanged. We will continue to build and maintain the CLI version. In fact, when you use Dashboard to provision a server, we check if the remote server has CLI. If not found, we automatically install CLI on the remote server.

Thereafter, most site-related features from the web interface trigger CLI commands on your server.

If you login to the server directly, you will be able to use EE CLI commands directly on it. In fact, we are the only solution in this “WordPress control panel” category where you can cancel our subscription, delete your EE Dashboard account, and still continue to manage your server using EE CLI commands.

After supporting the CLI project for 11 years, we hope that we manage to find a business model for EasyEngine with the Dashboard offering. If this works out, we will be not only supporting CLI but doubling down its development.

Our vision is to offer Dashboard as a web interface for convenience and additional features.

More about WP Cloud

As mentioned earlier, EasyEngine Dashboard was started as an internal project. We showed it to some friends who felt that we need more features to handle production-grade WordPress hosting than what EasyEngine can offer out of the box. 

That is when we came across WP Cloud and felt its compliments on what EE offers. As of now, you need to bring your WP Cloud API keys. We provide an interface and some additional features (e.g., team management) on top of WP Cloud. 

In the future, we plan to offer WP Cloud site creation under our API key.

We expect people will use a mix of EE CLI-based and WP Cloud sites based on their needs.

Here is a feature comparison between EE CLI and WP Cloud so you can decide when to use what.

EE Dashboard only features 

Below are some features you will get right away:

1. Web interface for site management (create, delete, edit)
2. Enable/disable/update credentials for PHPMyAdmin, Mailhog, HTTP Auth, and other admin tools
3. Manage multiple servers from a single interface 
4. Automatically create VPS with different providers
5. Team management with granular roles per user/per site
6. Easy site sharing within your organization
7. Permanent audit trail of user actions
8. Backups with the option to offload them to S3-compatible cloud storage.
9. View PHP, Nginx, and WordPress logs via the web interface.
10. Cache toggle/ purge from the web interface
11. CI/CD integration with GitHub
12. SSH key management
13. Realtime server load graphs for CPU, RAM, and disk space
14. Single sign on using Google Login
15. New Relic integration

A few upcoming features we have on the roadmap are:

1. Uptime monitoring
2. WordPress theme and plugin update checks, including vulnerabilities scanner
3. CrowdSec for better security and firewall
4. Performance monitoring and integration with webauditor.io
5. WordPress multisite support on WP Cloud 

VPS Provider Supported

In the first release, we added support for AWS, DigitalOcean, and Hetzner. If you add your API keys, we can directly provision servers on your account.

Apart from above, we support any Linux VPS running Ubuntu 22.04 or 24.04.

One special addition is WP Cloud support, which is the only provider where EE CLI is not used.

Pricing

We have plans starting at $9/month. Different plans have different servers and site limits. 

We do not plan to offer an unlimited plan, but at scale, you can manage additional sites for $0.5/month. This addon is a work in progress but will only affect you if you plan to manage more than 100 sites. In this case, just be on our currently highest plan ($49/month) and open a support request. We will manually and temporarily remove the server/site limit on your plan to unlimited while addon pricing feature is being implemented.

All our plans offer unlimited team members. We believe in teamwork, so we want you to invite all your team to the party!

We also offer a free plan so you can test out things and decide if it’s worth paying for the dashboard.

A Note of Thanks ❤️

In the past 11 years, EasyEngine CLI has been through many ups and downs, largely because it was a zero-revenue project. 

We want to thank our thousands of users for still sticking around and our donors who cheered us from time to time.

Whether you prefer the command-line interface or the dashboard, we hope to make it easy for you to manage WordPress sites at scale.

Links: EasyEngine Dashboard | CLI | WPCloud | Feature Request

The post Launching EasyEngine Web Dashboard with WP Cloud Integration appeared first on EasyEngine.

Features Added 🛠️

PHP 8.4 Support ⚙️

Please note that the New Relic PHP agent is not yet available for PHP 8.4. Once New Relic releases an updated agent compatible with PHP 8.4, we plan to add support for it in an upcoming patch release.

Stack Updates 📦

• PHP 8.1 bumped from 8.1.30 to 8.1.31
• PHP 8.2 bumped from 8.2.25 to 8.2.26
• PHP 8.3 bumped from 8.3.13 to 8.3.14
• Nginx-proxy bumped from 1.6.3 to 1.6.4

Update to the latest version

Fire the EasyEngine update command to update to the latest version

ee cli update

Links: Release | Documentation | Github

The post EasyEngine v4.8.0 Released appeared first on EasyEngine.

Configuration Enhancements 🛠️

• Updated HTTP/2 Nginx configuration.
• Improved site service migrations.
• Added cron configuration updates in migration.

Stack Updates 📦

• PHP 8.1 (8.1.28)
• PHP 8.2 (8.2.19)
• PHP 8.3 (8.3.7)
• Nginx-Proxy (1.5.2)

Bugfixes 🐛🚫

• Fixed a bug caused by a Docker Compose version update where site container names got dashes instead of underscores, affecting cron jobs. This has been resolved with updated cron configurations regeneration in the new update. To ensure proper cron job functionality, update to the latest version.
• Also, we have added cron config regeneration in the EasyEngine updates migration runner to handle changes from Docker/Docker Compose updates for all future releases.

Update to the latest version

Fire the EasyEngine update command to update to the latest version

ee cli update

Links: Release | Documentation | Github

The post EasyEngine v4.7.1 Released appeared first on EasyEngine.

Features Added 🛠️

PHP 8.2 and 8.3 Support ⚙️

We have added support for PHP 8.2 and PHP 8.3 in site creation. You can now create sites with PHP 8.2 and PHP 8.3, as well as update existing sites to these versions. In addition, we have decided to make PHP 8.2 the default for any future site creation.

Support for Docker-Compose v2 🐳

We have added support for Docker Compose v2, updated compose template to support the latest docker and docker-compose release and removed all things deprecated.

Stack Updates 📦

• PHP 8.1 (8.1.14 -> 8.1.25)
• PHP 8.2 (8.2.9)
• PHP 8.3 (8.3.6)
• OpenResty (1.21.4.1 -> 1.25.3.1)
• Nginx-Proxy (1.0.3 -> 1.5.1)
• Redis (7.0.5 -> 7.2.4)

Update to the latest version

Fire the EasyEngine update command to update to the latest version

ee cli update

Links: Release | Documentation | Github

The post EasyEngine v4.7.0 Released appeared first on EasyEngine.

If you would like to use the EasyEngine 3 Nginx-build, please refer this wiki page with all the details on how to build it yourself.

The post Retiring EasyEngine 3 Nginx build appeared first on EasyEngine.

Features Added 🛠️

Support for Custom Docker Compose 👩‍🔧

We have added support for complete custom docker-compose support. We had initially released custom docker-compose support in Version 4.2.0, but it was very limited support. It could only override EasyEngine services, and could not add any services, also it had no commands to just enable/disable/restart the custom compose services.

This version brings full feature with support for multiple custom compose files and controls to enable/disable/restart custom compose services independently as well as in sync with site services. In addition to that, you can now add other services like ElasticSearch, Memcache, Nodejs etc. to the site.

To see how you can make use of this feature, check out our handbook page on this topic.

Bugfixes 🐛🚫

Fix relayhost and msmrtpc config.

Links: Release | Documentation | Github

The post EasyEngine v4.6.0 Released appeared first on EasyEngine.

Feature Enhancements 🛠️

Server Wide Environment Type Support

This env support was inspired by wp_get_environment_type and supports the same possible values.

This feature was initially released in v4.5.3, but it had very limited functionality. From this release onwards it is taking more actions based on the set env.

If a value is set up for a server-wide environment, then it will:

1. Setup the WP Config variable WP_ENVIRONMENT_TYPE on site creation with the set value in ee config.
2. If the environment is set to ‘local’, ‘development’, or ‘staging’, then on site create and clone, mailhog will be enabled by default.

To register the server-wide environment, you need to run the following command:

ee config set env 

Where possible values for <environment> are ‘local’, ‘development’, ‘staging’, and ‘production’. If not set, it defaults to ‘production’. 

Bugfixes 🐛🚫

We have fixed a few issues in the codebase that were not reported in the PHP Compatibility test for running EasyEngine CLI in PHP 8.0 environment.

Links: Release | Documentation | Github

The post EasyEngine v4.5.5 Released appeared first on EasyEngine.

Features Added ✨️

PHP 8.1 Site Support

We have added support for PHP 8.1 on sites. So now you can create new sites on PHP 8.1, as well as update existing sites to PHP 8.1. We haven’t made PHP 8.0 or PHP 8.1 default for new sites as it may break some plugins. However, it may happen in the future.

Currently, the default PHP version on creating sites is PHP 7.4.

# Create new site with PHP 8.1
ee site create example.com --type=wp --php=8.1

# Updates existing site to PHP 8.1
ee site update example.com --php=8.1

Bugfixes 🐛

• Fix VIP site creation.
• Fix double WP_DEBUG constant for new sites.

Stack Updates 🔄

• OpenResty (1.19.9.1 minor updates)
• PHP 7.4 (7.4.26 -> 7.4.28)
• PHP 8.0 (8.0.13 -> 8.0.17)
• PHP 8.1 (8.1.4)

Links: Release | Documentation | Github

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