PanelAlpha Engine 2.2.0: Take your WordPress to your own VPS

The PHP world has been keeping a close eye on security lately, and so have we. We’ve been doing our part to keep PanelAlpha users protected, making sure the necessary fixes and updated images are available. Now that those security updates are in place (and hopefully already installed on your servers), we’re back with something we’ve been looking forward to sharing: PanelAlpha Engine 2.2.0.

This release brings a much bigger role for WordPress in the new Engine. You can now move an existing WordPress site onto your own server and manage it through an AI assistant, API or CLI. Alongside that, we’ve added more ways to monitor your projects, work with staging copies, and manage the services around your applications.

Bring your WordPress to Engine

Moving an existing website to a new server can be tricky, especially when you need to keep its domain, content and settings intact. With Engine 2.2.0, you can import an existing WordPress site into a new project or an empty one you’ve already created, without having to handle the whole move yourself.

There are two ways to connect the source site:

Before starting, Engine can check the source and tell you whether it’s ready to be imported. If something is preventing the move, you get a reason before any new project or files are created.

Your site keeps its domain, and Engine shows the DNS record you’ll need when you’re ready to point it to the new server. You can follow the import’s progress, resume it if needed, or cancel it and remove what the migration created.

For us, this is an important part of making self-hosting more practical. You should be able to bring a project you’ve already built, rather than feel that moving to your own server means starting over.

Manage WordPress with your assistant

Once your site is running, there’s a lot more you can do without opening wp-admin for every task. Engine now provides dedicated WordPress operations through MCP, the API and CLI. Your assistant can help you check and update plugins or themes, manage users, work with WordPress core, clear caches, change settings, or export and import the database.

These are specific operations rather than instructions to run arbitrary commands, which makes common tasks easier to describe and use. For example, you can ask your assistant to check for plugin updates or clear a site’s cache. And when a plugin or theme is causing trouble, you can run supported operations without loading plugins, giving you another way to work on a site that isn’t behaving as expected.

Importantly, WordPress running in a project’s own containers is included too. Both the new WordPress operations and WP-CLI are available there, including database commands. Whether you’re using classic PHP hosting or a container-based WordPress setup, you have more ways to handle maintenance from the tools you already use.

See what each project is using

Keeping projects running also means understanding what they need from your server. Engine now records CPU and memory use for each project and each container, with recent measurements and a history you can look back through. Server metrics are available over the last hour, day, week or 30 days, including disk usage.

You can also see this month’s bandwidth use in the project list, along with clearer information about each application’s type and current status. That makes it easier to see which projects are running normally, which are still building and where you might need to take a closer look. Instead of checking everything separately, you get a more useful picture of your server and the projects on it.

Help us keep Engine moving

We’re building Engine in the open, and every bit of interest helps. If you like what we’re doing, a ★ on GitHub would mean a lot. And if you’ve got feedback, spotted an issue or want to contribute, we’re always happy to hear from you.

Explore Engine on GitHub

Less manual work around your projects

There are also useful changes to the tools and services around deployment. Engine can now register and maintain deployment webhooks directly with GitHub, GitLab and Bitbucket, so you have fewer steps to handle when connecting a repository. With a project’s Cloudflare token, your assistant can check its settings, clear the cache and adjust its security level. And a new SSL check helps you compare the certificate visible through public DNS with the one served by Engine.

We’ve also made staging and cloning safer for container projects. Copies now get their own database, public address, account, environment variables and tokens rather than sharing those of the original project. WordPress copies use their own database and domain too, and a failed push can roll back its changes. That gives you more room to test without putting the live project at risk.

Token rotation is available too, allowing you to replace a token while keeping the old one valid for a short handover period. We’ve also tightened how Git commands access remote addresses, kept file operations within their projects, and updated the Engine and account images with the latest OS security fixes.

Not done making things easier

We want people to have more control over where their projects run, without all the extra stress that comes with it. With every release, we’re working to make that choice easier, whether you’re moving an existing website, launching something new, or managing projects already running on your server.

There’s always room to improve, and we’re putting as much effort into getting the basics right as we are into building new features. Version 2.2.0 brings plenty of both, so have a look at the full changelog to see what else we’ve been working on.

View full changelog