EasyEngine v4 Beta-1 Release

After a long wait, finally, it’s time to try out EasyEngine v4 first BETA version. ☢ ⚠ ☠

This is really a beta release. Do NOT use it in production. It doesn’t include any code to migrate from v3 to v4. So as of now, there is no point in cloning a VPS setup by the EasyEngine version 3, and then attempting the version 4 installation/upgrade on it. That is something we will handle in one of upcoming beta.

For now, we need your help in testing the first beta to understand if we missed anything major, unintentionally, in the complete rewrite.

Also, there are few things EasyEngine 4 won’t have in its “core”, even after beta. There is a reason for stressing the word core as new EasyEngine allows features to be added via EasyEngine packages. In fact, the site-command is implemented as a package. More on packages later in another post!

EasyEngine v4 won’t have

  1. Multiple full-page caching backends like WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, and Nginx cache are not available. Instead there will be only one Redis cache (--wpredis) option for full-page caching. If you are using another caching mechanism on v3, you no need to worry about it at the moment. We will try our best to handle things in an automated and safe way from v3 to v4 upgrade script. (see issue #1015)
  2. Support for webmail hosting. So if you have set up something like ViMbaAdmin, you will need to find an alternative. We use G Suite (formally GoogleApps everywhere). So it’s hard to invest in a feature we don’t use ourself. But if you are a PHP developer and would like to implement something like ee webmail command, please get in touch with us. We will be happy to guide you how to bundle webmail hosting in an EasyEngine package.
  3. A dedicated port such as 22222 for admin tools. Instead admin tools will be moved to /ee-admin subpath. This means no extra firewall or cloudflare config to access admin tools. (see issue #1013)

v4 Beta-1 limitations

Below are limitations of beta but will be handled before we ship final version 4! ⏳

  1. Comparing with version 3, the only ee site command is added. A few other commands will be added in subsequent beta releases.
  2. Site creation has been limited to WordPress site types. Both single site and multisite WordPress variant are supported. But support for other site types html, php, proxy site isn’t included in this version.
  3. This beta version does not contain LetsEncrypt SSL support. But we don’t expect sites created with beta release to be used in production.
  4. Site created with this beta won’t have admin tools such as phpMyAdmin, redis-cache web viewer avaialble.

Please understand limitations of beta release so you test beta with clear expectations.

v4 Beta-1 includes

  1. This beta1 release includes the basic EasyEngine site functionalities, and focusing on the WordPress based sites first. Please see command list in next section.
  2. Basic site actions like create, delete, enable, disable, list and info are available in this version.
  3. The site create command includes the flexibility of adding most of the wp core download, wp config create and wp core install flags. You can take a look at ee help site create to find out all the supported flags. This is new feature in v4. ?
  4. An effect of supporting wp-cli flag is that v4 will make non-English WordPress installs easier. You can pass --locale= flag with a value WordPress support during site creation and EE v4 will pass it correctly to wp-cli internally. The default locale is en_US but it can be modified in global config /opt/easyengine/config.yml.

Install EasyEngine v4 beta-1

We have created an automated installed for Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04, 18.04 and Debian 8. Installing beta-1 is just a command-away!

wget -qO ee rt.cx/ee4beta && sudo bash ee

Since EasyEngine v4 uses docker for all heavylifting, it is very easy to run on almost every *nix OS including MacOS. You can see some details in installation part of README.

v4 Commands (to test)

You can test following commands with v4 beta-1. Please note that the syntax might change slightly as we move towards stable release. But following should work for beta-1 right now.

Site creation

ee site create example.com --wp  # install wordpress without any page caching
ee site create example.com --wpredis # install wordpress + redis caching
ee site create example.com --wpsubir # install wpmu-subdirectory without any page caching
ee site create example.com --wpsubir --wpredis # install wpmu-subdirectory + redis caching
ee site create example.com --wpsubdom # install wpmu-subdomain without any page caching
ee site create example.com --wpsubdom --wpredis # install wpmu-subdomain + redis caching

Site delete

ee site delete example.com

Site enable/disable

ee site disable example.com
ee site enable example.com

Site info

ee site info example.com

Site list

ee site list

EasyEngine will currently only run with root privileges.

You can run ee help, ee help site and ee help site create to get all the details about the various commands and subcommands that you can run.

If you encounter any issue when testing beta-1 release, please create an issue on main Github repo.

WordCamp Europe

I will be attending WordCamp Europe. If you are around, I would love to chat with you about EasyEngine. I am rahul286 on Twitter. ?

Links: v4 Beta-1 release

11 responses to “EasyEngine v4 Beta-1 Release”

  1. Really happy to see this, super excited about the move to PHP, and great call to remove the mentioned features to focus on the core product. (I have never used any of the ones mentioned.)

    • Thank you for your interest in EasyEngine. We have planned for a package system(which will be released with v4 stable) that will allow the community to build packages for EasyEngine that will support multiple site types like Laravel, Ghost, etc. We’re working on the beta releases which will support WordPress site type for now.
      We’ll also release a blog post soon explaining the roadmap from beta to v4 stable release.

  2. wget -qO ee rt.cx/ee4beta && sudo bash ee works fine on a new droplet at DigitalOcean but won’t install on a new VPS at Linode.

  3. Just to make – with v4, there is no option to send email just like that? you must have a 3rd party email service?