Run a fleet of WordPress sites like it was one.
CaptainCore is the toolkit behind Anchor Hosting: a control plane, a command line and the scripts that keep thousands of WordPress sites updated, backed up, monitored and secure. Built in production, MIT licensed, published for anyone who runs sites for a living.
Five pieces. Use one, or all of them.
The Manager and the CLI are the platform. The rest are the tools that fell out of running it, each useful on its own.
This is the real thing, not a mockup
Screens from CaptainCore Manager as it ships, running a sample fleet of Austin's own sites. The numbers are sample data; the interface is exactly what Anchor Hosting customers use.
Home: what needs attention, what is running, what changed
Sites: filter by plugin, theme, core version or label
Site overview: credentials, environment, domains, accounts
Quicksaves: daily version history with rollback
Security: vulnerabilities, checksums, coverage
DNS: a full zone editor, import and export
Console: run any command across the fleet, live
Two halves, one contract
The Manager never touches a customer server. It asks the CLI to, then stores and presents what comes back. WordPress stays stateless about credentials; the heavy lifting stays on a dedicated box.
- Fleet state in custom tables
- REST API + dashboard
- Accounts, billing, portals
- WP-CLI cron commands
- SSH into every site
- Remote scripts + WP-CLI
- Restic backups, git quicksaves
- Uptime, screenshots, updates
- Kinsta, WP Engine, Rocket.net
- GridPane, anything with WP-CLI
- No agent plugin required
- Staging and production
POST /wp-json/captaincore/v1/api
{ "token": "…", "command": "sync-data", "site_id": 84, "environment": "Production", "data": { … } }Every ingest is one token-authed POST. Add a command on the CLI, add a branch in the Manager, done.
Anchor Hosting runs on it. All of it.
CaptainCore was not built to be a product. It was built so one person could run a managed WordPress host without a support team. Every backup, update, DNS change, invoice and security patch at Anchor Hosting goes through the code on this site, and every customer logs into CaptainCore Manager at anchor.host/account.
- Sites under management
- 3,000
- Customers since 2014
- 800+
- People on the team
- 1
- Backups verified
- nightly
I publish CaptainCore so other developers can see how a WordPress hosting business actually works under the hood, borrow ideas from it, or run it themselves.
The services a real host already uses
No proprietary agents, no lock-in. CaptainCore wraps the APIs and tools that were already there.
Recipes you can paste into a terminal today
#!/bin/bash
+ 56 more lines
Hunt Unnecessary Files on Kinsta
Returns storage usage of debug.log file and private folder on Kinsta.
results=""
+ 6 more lines
Download file from Google Drive shared link
Will download from a Google Drive shared link using wget. Swap out <google-file-id> and <file-name> with Google's unique file ID shown in…
wget --no-check-certificate -r 'https://docs.google.com/uc?export=<google-file-id>' -O <file-name>
Disk Usage
Overall disk usage within home WordPress directory.
home=$( wp option get home )
+ 2 more lines
Things people ask
Is CaptainCore free?
Yes. The Manager and the CLI are MIT licensed on GitHub. _do and the cookbook are free too. There is nothing to buy and no hosted tier.
Can I run it myself?
You can, with a caveat: this is opinionated software built to run one specific hosting business. It assumes a companion CLI server, and parts of it lean on third-party services like Constellix, Kinsta and Mailgun. Expect to read source rather than follow a setup wizard.
Which hosts does it work with?
Any host that gives you SSH and WP-CLI. Provider APIs add extras (site creation, staging, cache purges) for Kinsta, GridPane and Rocket.net. Nothing is installed on the site itself beyond an optional must-use helper.
How is it different from ManageWP or MainWP?
No agent plugin on every site and no vendor in the middle. The CLI talks to sites over SSH, quicksaves are real git commits, backups are restic repositories you own, and the dashboard is a plugin on your own WordPress install. It is the tooling a host uses internally, not a portal sold to hosts.
Where is the documentation?
Right here on this site, written from the source, plus the readme in each repository. The development updates are the story of how it got here.
Who builds it?
Austin Ginder, who also runs Anchor Hosting. CaptainCore is the reason a one-person host can look after three thousand sites.
Take the source for a spin.
Install the Manager on any WordPress site, point a CLI server at it, and you have the same control plane that runs Anchor Hosting. Or just borrow the parts you like.
wp plugin install https://github.com/CaptainCore/captaincore-manager/releases/latest/download/captaincore-manager.zip --activatecurl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/CaptainCore/captaincore/master/install.sh | bash