WordPress sites

What is a site on Pierrr?

A WordPress site on Pierrr is a project like any other. You give a name and an administrator email address, Pierrr takes care of the rest: the project the site lives in, the container, the database, the address and the HTTPS certificate.

The site arrives already installed. There is no WordPress wizard to fill in: the administrator account exists the first time you open the admin.

Creating a site

It all happens from the Projects page of your dashboard. Click “Create a project”, at the top of the page, then choose “WordPress site” among Frameworks, WordPress site and Migrate from another host. There is no separate page for sites.

That choice opens a dialog that asks for two things only:

• The site name, the one WordPress shows and the one the project row shows.
• The administrator email address, the WordPress account that receives password resets.

“Create the site” starts the rest: the project, the site address on a managed subdomain, the database and the certificate.

Creating a site requires the right to create projects: a Developer role cannot create a site, and the Billing role has no access to projects.

A site takes up one project in your quotas. If your plan is already at its project limit, the three choices (Frameworks, WordPress site, Migration) are disabled together, with a notice and a link to the plans: free up a project or change plan. Without the required right, the Create a project button is greyed out, with the reason.

The administrator password

The administrator account is created along with the site. A dialog titled “Credentials for”, followed by your site name, opens right after creation: it shows the user name, pier-admin, and the password, each with its own copy button.

Write the password down before closing that dialog: past that screen it is no longer readable anywhere.

To get a new one, use the WordPress “Lost your password?” link: the message goes to the administration address you gave at creation.

Where to find your site

The site you created shows up in the table on the Projects page, like any project: its name, its health, its containers and its creation date. There is no separate list to check.

The install finishes on its own, give it a minute or two. Until it does, the site is not reachable yet: open the project to follow its container.

Opening the site and its admin

Open the project from the Projects page. The WordPress container shows a link to the site's public address, as soon as that address is ready.

The WordPress admin sits at that same address, followed by /wp-admin. Sign in with the pier-admin user name and the password you wrote down at creation.

A site is an ordinary Pierrr container

A WordPress site is not a thing apart: it is an ordinary Pierrr container. You find it in its project, with its deployments, its domain, its logs and its resources, just like an app deployed from a repository.

So you can attach a custom domain to it like to any other service: add the domain, let the DNS verification pass, then bind it to the site's container. The steps are the ones on the Domains page.

Themes, plugins and media

Install your themes and plugins from the WordPress admin, as on any other host. They are kept, along with your media library files, and survive container restarts and redeployments alike.

WordPress updates

The WordPress core comes from the official image and is updated with it. Automatic core updates from the admin are therefore switched off: they would be lost the next time the container restarts.

Plugins and themes are not affected: update them from the admin as usual.

Backups

Backups happen at project level, not site by site. A project backup carries the database of every site it hosts, with your posts, your pages and your accounts, along with its content folder: themes, plugins and media.

A restore puts both back, the database and the content.