General Ploi Settings

• Click your avatar (top right) > Profile

  • Settings > Theme mode > Dark —I'm not usually a big dark-mode fan but I like it here

  • Backup configurations > configure these as needed

  • Security > Enable 2FA here

• Server > Select your server > PHP

  • Manage Extensions (button)

    • Imagick (checkbox)

  • Enable OPcache (button). If we're using Statamic and have the default php7.4-fpm reload command in our deploy script, then we don't need to worry about the warning here

Editing File Backups

If you've spent some time setting up file backups (as above) you can edit or run them manually—but the settings are in a different place. Go to Sites > Your Site > Manage > File Backups

Notifications

• Click your avatar (top right) > Profile

  • Integrations

    • Set this up first with whatever service you'd like. Personally I use Google Drive for backups and Telegram for notifications, so I'll include instructions for them below.

  • Notification Channels

    • For Telegram I chose a label of “Telegram” and clicked “Create”

Setting Up Notifications for Sites

Once you've set up this base configuration you'll need to set up notifications on a site basis.

• Sites > Your Site > Notifications

  • Select your Telegram setup here from the dropdown

Setting Up Server Notifications

• Servers > Your Server > Monitoring > add a notification for anything over 80%. There's no basis for this number, but it felt like a good point at which I'd like to take action.

  • While you're here, click the channel notification to also send an alert through Telegram if this happens

• Server > Manage > Automatic update notifications > choose a service to be notified on e.g. Telegram. I tend to set up automatic server updates on a weekly basis here.

Password Protect a Site

I thought it was worth mentioning how to do this since it's a brilliant feature that's not easily discoverable. Password protection is desiable if you're working on a site that is under NDA or if maybe contains confidential information while under development.

To password protect a site go to Sites > Your Site > Manage > Authentication (button)

There are a few ways to use Statamic—workflow and licence-wise. This video may be useful if you're checking out Statamic with a solo licence and need to pull down some changes from your production environment, or you may just want to make sure your server can push to your repo via SSH if you're setting up Statamic Pro Git integration.

Make Sure You Have Your Repository Linked to Ploi Via SSH

One “Gotcha” with Ploi is if you link to a repository using the built-in “wizard” it will link to your repository using the OAuth protocol. Oath defaults to HTTPS, which means we won't be using SSH to push changes. This causes issues when trying to push back to the repository.

To solve this, when you link a site to a repository in Ploi, instead of selecting your provider, choose “Custom”. At this point, you need to ensure that you add your Ploi sever's SSH key to your account with your provider. Ploi will show you the SSH key to add when you select “Custom”. Copy the key, and (in Bitbucket, for example) go to your Personal Settings > SSH Keys > Add Key – paste in the copied SSH key and call it something like “Ploi - Name of your server”.

Go back into your repository in Bitbucket and click the “Clone” button in the top right. This will reveal the address of your Bitbucket repository. It will look something like this:

git@bitbucket.org:jaygeorge/jaygeorge.co.uk-statamic.git

Paste this into the Repository field in Ploi, select “Install composer dependencies” as usual and then click “Install Repository”. A huge thank you to Stephen Meehan for helping me out with this gotcha.

Check The Git Status On Your Server and Commit Changes to Git

1. SSH into your machine, using a command like ssh ploi@yourserveripaddresshere

2. Make sure you're in the correct directory—with Ploi that'll probably be a command like: cd yourdomainname.com

3. git remote -v this should now show you two SSH-style addresses—one for fetch and one for pull.

4. git status to see if there are any changes to the production site that you can push up to Git.

5. Go ahead and add your changes to production e.g.

   1. git add .

   2. git commit -m "Content changes"

   3. git push

You should now be able to pull your changes down to your site locally using the git pull command.

Adding Your Computer’s SSH Key to Ploi

You'll first need to add your computer's SSH key to Ploi. You'll also need to do this if you connect via SFTP using software that uses your computer's SSH key (Forklift is an example of this).

1. Copy your computer's SSH key. You can do this by running cat ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub if you have a key with RSA encryption, or cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub if you have a key with ED encryption

2. Open Terminal and SSH into your server by running ssh ploi@youripaddresshere, which will look something like ssh ploi@178.128.35.22. You should now be logged into your server.

Making Your SSH Key Persistent

If you're running macOS 10.12 or later (you probably are) then you'll need to do a few things to make your SSH key persistent. Create a config file in your SSH directory (the same directory where your public key is, e.g., .ssh/) and in the config file add the text:

Host *
 AddKeysToAgent yes
 UseKeychain yes
 IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_ed25519

If you're running with the older RSA encryption then it will look like this:

Host *
 AddKeysToAgent yes
 UseKeychain yes
 IdentityFile ~/.ssh/id_rsa

Finally, run the following in Terminal:

ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/id_ed25519

Or if you're running with the older RSA encryption:

ssh-add -K ~/.ssh/id_rsa

SFTP Details

This is a sample of what your SFTP details will look like:

Protocol: SFTP
Server: 46.101.80.111 (replace this with your server's ip address)
Username: ploi
Password: this will be the 'sudo' password you were sent when Ploi installed your server
Port: 22

1. You typically need to run a set of commands after each deploy. These commands may do things like clear the cache, and recompile assets like Tailwind / minified CSS and JS using Webpack.

2. Laravel needs to be run on a folder named public rather than the wide-standard for hosts, public_html. This can be a change to resolve, especially on shared hosting where it's typically not even possible to rename the public_html folder.

Using a host that supports Laravel environments makes things a lot easier and I strongly recommend you go this route unless you love tinkering with servers and making your life more difficult.

Choosing a Host

N.B. If you decide to sign up to Ploi I would very much appreciate it if you used my referral code https://ploi.io/register?referrer=JjynFt5S8WmoZbiAZO3E

The two most popular “server management” solutions (note: not quite the same as a host—we’ll get to that later)—are:

• Laravel Forge – built by Taylor Otwell. Taylor is the creator of the Laravel Framework and so this is a solid choice.

• Ploi – Similar to Forge but more encompassing, with extra bells and whistles which make it easier to connect to repositories, and with a much nicer UI, in my opinion. Ploi also has PHPMyAdmin built-in, so if you have existing sites on other CMS's like WordPress or Perch (which I did), you can migrate them and keep everything in one place.

Whether you choose Forge or Laravel, both of these services have the same purpose – to administrate a host/server more easily. In terms of hosts, the most popular options for Statamic are Digital Ocean and Linode. Digital Ocean seems to be the favourite, and so my final recommendation would be a Statamic setup of using Ploi to manage a Digital Ocean server.

Publishing a Statamic Site using Ploi

Let's start from scratch with a free Ploi trial—we'll go from signing up to a trial to getting a Statamic site live. p.s. if you decide you like Ploi and want to help a man out, please use my referral code: https://ploi.io/register?referrer=JjynFt5S8WmoZbiAZO3E

1. Sign up to a free trial on ploi.io

2. Add a Git Provider – In the Dashboard click the “Link Git Provider” button, where you'll be prompted to link to your GitHub, BitBucket, or GitLab accounts. If you're a little unsure on Git, my Working With Git video may help you.

3. Link to a Server Provider – Select your Server Provider. In my case, I'm using Digital Ocean.

   1. In Digital Ocean go to “API” in the bottom of the left column.

   2. Select “Generate a new Token”, call it something like “Ploi”.

   3. Copy the token using the little “copy” link.

   4. Go back to Ploi and paste the token in the “API Key” field. Label it something like “Digital Ocean” and click “Add Provider”.

4. Create a Server – In the Dashboard click the “Create Server” button. Select your server provider and then in the “Details” section use the Credentials dropdown to select the account you just created. Fill the in the details here. If you're just starting out the lowest server plan should be fine. You'll want to make sure you select a Server Region that's closest to your main customer base. When you're done click the “Create Server” button. Ploi will now use Digital Ocean's API to create a server for you on their platform. This might take a bit of time – go and get a cuppa tea—you deserve it! it took 20 minutes for the progress bar to reach 100% for me.

At this point you'll be e-mailed server details. Save these somewhere safe (you'll need them!). I would personally then delete the e-mail for security reasons.

Recommended Ploi Settings

• Click your avatar in the top right > Profile – set up TwoFactor Authentication here.

• Settings > Theme mode – change this to Dark mode if you're a fan.

• I'd recommend you use ImageMagick to process images rather than GD, which produces better quality image processing. For more information on that see my post about getting ImageMagick working locally. To enable ImageMagick in Ploi, go to Servers > PHP > Manage Extensions and check Imagick

Creating a Site

1. In the Ploi dashboard > left hand menu > Servers > select your server – add a domain you'd like to link here e.g. yourdomain.com and click Add Site.

2. Once the site has been created, click it, and select “Git Install Repository”, choose your provider and select your repository. Make sure you select “Install composer dependencies”, and then click Install Repository.

3. At this point you'll be prompted to add some recommended script commands, ignore this – I'll give you some recommendations instead. Click “Ignore suggestions”

Once you can see the Deploy script, add these lines below where it says “echo "🚀 Application deployed!"”

npm install
npm run production

php artisan optimize
php please cache:clear
php please stache:refresh

php artisan route:cache
php artisan view:clear

The full deploy script should now look something like this (bear in mind your site directory will be different and your php version might be different).

cd /home/ploi/yourdomain.com
git pull origin master
composer install --no-interaction --prefer-dist --optimize-autoloader
echo "" | sudo -S service php7.4-fpm reload

echo "🚀 Application deployed!"

npm install
npm run production

php artisan optimize
php please cache:clear
php please stache:refresh

php artisan route:cache
php artisan view:clear

When you've finished editing the deploy script click “Save”

Click the “Edit Environment” button in the top right:

• Change the APP_URL to https://yourdomain.com (rather than plain ol’ http).

• Change the APP_ENV to production

Then in the top right click “Deploy Now”. Once you've successfully deployed your repository you can remove the npm install line.

Pointing your DNS to Ploi

In your domain registrar's DNS records, you should have the following three lines:

1. An A record for * with a value of your server’s IP address (which you can find in the top left of Ploi once you're in a server or its sites)

2. An A record for @ with a value of your server’s IP address

3. A cname record for www with a value of yourdomain.com

Setting up an SSL Certificate for your Domain with Ploi

Once you've gone into your site in Ploi > left hand menu > SSL – accept the defaults here and click “Add certificate”. At this point Ploi will check with the DNS to connect. if you've correctly pointed your DNS to ploi this should work.

Automatically Deploying

When you push to your installed branch, Ploi will run the deploy script for you.

A final thing to consider is whether you'd like to automatically deploy your site when you push up to Git. You may want to be careful with this if you're handling a big client but otherwise, this is a big productivity boost. Once you've gone into your site in Ploi > left hand menu > Repository – scroll down to the Quick deploy heading and click “Enable Quick Deploy”. Another possible workflow is if you set up a staging site on Ploi and automatically deploy to that.

Quick Deploy Not Showing

I've run into a problem previously where "Quick Deploy" wasn't visible in the "Repository" section. I believe this happens when you initially add the repository using the "Custom" option rather than the built-in BitBucket/GitHub integration.

It's still possible to enable quick deploy though. To get around this, in Ploi > left hand menu > Repository – scroll down to the Repository section, and change "Custom" to "BitBucket" or "GitHub". Make sure the repository name is in the format "username/repo_name", for example "jaygeorge/london-local". The repository URL field should already automatically be in the correct format from when it was previously saved as "Custom", e.g. "git@bitbucket.org/jaygeorge/london-local.git"

Once you've turned Quick Deploy on, if you like you can switch back to "Custom" and Ploi should continue to quick-deploy.