What's New✨

Prior to today, access permissions in SpinupWP were painfully basic. Every team member would have access to all of the team’s servers and would be limited by their role: User or Admin. A team member with the User role could manage sites, databases, and their own SSH keys on all of the team’s servers while an Admin had full access to all of the team’s servers.

Today, we’ve renamed the User role to Site Admin, the Admin role to Team Admin, and we’ve introduced a new role: Server Admin. A team member with the Server Admin role is able to update servers, manage sudo users, manage server settings, and restart services like Nginx and MySQL in addition to all the things a Site Admin can do. The capabilities of the Site Admin and Team Admin roles remain the same.

You also now have the ability to limit team member access to specific servers for Site Admin and Server Admin roles.

Check out the Team Roles doc for full details including instructions on how to update your Personal account to a Team account.

When spinning up a new server, you used to have the choice between MySQL and MariaDB. As of today, MariaDB is no longer an option. MariaDB will continue to work on existing servers with SpinupWP.

Read more…

It’s only been a few months since Ubuntu 22.04 LTS shipped and even less since most server providers started offering it, so we’re very happy to officially support it in SpinupWP as of today. We’ve tested on DigitalOcean, AWS EC2, Vultr, Linode, and Google Cloud. We would have tested AWS Lightsail, but it doesn’t offer a 22.04 LTS option yet.

If you’re looking to upgrade your existing servers from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS or 20.04 LTS to Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, you should definitely check out our recommendations first.

We’ve enhanced the log viewer with a basic search. You can now search a site’s log file from the Logs tab. We plan to allow grep syntax in the future.

Newly provisioned servers will now use Redis 7.0. Existing servers will not be updated to Redis 7.0 by SpinupWP. If you want to upgrade Redis on an existing server, you will need to do it manually.

SpinupWP has always installed and configured MySQL or MariaDB when spinning up a new server. Starting today, you have the option to provide connection information for an external database server instead.

Choosing this option will skip the installation of MySQL or MariaDB and use that external database server for all your sites on the web server.

When a web server is struggling to handle traffic to a site, most folks reach for the “upgrade server” lever first. Increasing CPU and memory (scaling vertically) is the quickest and easiest thing to do. However, at some point you’ll max out the CPU and memory limits. Then what?

Load balancing is often the next lever folks reach for, but the first step in scaling horizontally is to move MySQL/MariaDB onto a separate database server. Having a separate database server also makes moving sites between servers a lot easier because you don’t have to move the database. This benefit is a good reason to move MySQL/MariaDB to a separate database server well before maxing out CPU and memory limits on a single server.

In fact, we ran deliciousbrains.com (WordPress + WooCommerce) with an external database (DigitalOcean Managed Database – MySQL 8) since August 2020 and it worked great.

For more details and our recommendations, see the External Databases doc.

We’re also working on two more docs with step-by-step instructions for creating a managed database on DigitalOcean and Amazon Lightsail, and then adding it to SpinupWP as an external database. Stay tuned for those.

A command line interface is one of SpinupWP’s most frequently requested features. The wait is finally over!

Visit the SpinupWP CLI project on GitHub for complete installation and usage instructions. The first step is to require the package globally via Composer:

composer global require spinupwp/spinupwp-cli

Make sure the /vendor/bin directory in your global Composer home directory is in your system’s PATH. This could be ~/.composer/ or ~/.config/composer/, depending on your operating system. You can use the composer config --global home command to check this location.

Once you’ve finished installation, you’ll have access to the spinupwp command:

spinupwp <subcommand>

Read more…

WARNING: WordPress core is not yet compatible with PHP 8.1. Many themes and plugins are currently incompatible as well. We strongly recommend testing thoroughly on staging before switching any of your production sites to PHP 8.1.

SpinupWP now supports PHP 8.1. WP-CLI has been updated on all customer servers to version 2.6.0, which introduces PHP 8.1 compatibility.

You can now select PHP 8.1 when creating a new site and update existing sites to use PHP 8.1 via the SpinupWP dashboard. From a site’s dashboard, select “Settings” on the left menu, then select the version you want from the PHP dropdown menu.

We’ve added the ability to run a post-provision script every time you set up a new server. All post-provision scripts run as the root user once your server has been successfully provisioned.

Post-provision scripts can be added when spinning up a new server. Clicking in the text box provided will allow you to enter the desired scripts.

Installing custom software on your server is the most typical use-case for post-provision scripts, such as installing Node.js and npm so you can compile frontend assets on the server. To do that, you would run these scripts:

apt-get install -q -y nodejs;
apt-get install -q -y npm;

We’ve implemented a new design for the desktop navigation dropdown menu, simplifying the view for most users. You’ll now only see teams displayed if you already have a team set up. Having teams visible by default led to some confusion among the users who only had personal accounts.

The old “Teams” dropdown menu has been removed, with those links and functionality now in the main navigation. Your avatar at the top right of the screen indicates the team you’re currently using. Clicking on your avatar opens a dropdown menu from which you can select another team.

We’ve also added an account switcher function to the Settings, Team Settings, and Billing pages. This new dropdown menu clearly shows the account you’re viewing, whether that’s your personal account or the account of one of the teams you’re managing. This makes it easier to manage team settings, and ensures you can always tell which is which.

Dark mode has arrived in SpinupWP! This has been one of our most requested features to date.

SpinupWP will automatically detect if your browser is running dark mode, and switch accordingly. You can also change this manually in your account settings.

The first step is to log into your SpinupWP dashboard. Next, click your avatar in the top-right corner and click “Account Settings” from the drop-down menu to access your account settings.

The setting defaults to “Auto,” where SpinupWP matches the light/dark mode of your browser. You can force SpinupWP to use a different mode by clicking on Light or Dark and then clicking Save.

Newly provisioned servers will now use Redis 6.2. Existing servers will not be updated to Redis 6.2 by SpinupWP.