Skip to content

Publishing or exporting a finished site

SpawnWP does not decide how you publish a finished WordPress site. You can create a backup, use a migration plugin, export content, copy files and databases manually, or use any deployment workflow that suits the project.

The tool described on this page is SpawnWP Deploy, an optional WordPress plugin. It is not part of the SpawnWP installer, it is not installed automatically, and it is not required to create or use environments in the cockpit.

Keep these actions separate

Action What it means
Install SpawnWP Set up the self-hosted lab and cockpit on your server.
Deploy in the cockpit Create a disposable WordPress environment inside your SpawnWP lab.
Publish or export a finished site Move finished work somewhere else using a method you choose.

SpawnWP Deploy applies only to the third action. It offers one guarded transfer from a source WordPress site inside SpawnWP to a separate, fresh and empty WordPress installation.

Use a fresh destination

SpawnWP Deploy is available from the official WordPress.org Plugin Directory, but a transfer must still target a fresh, empty WordPress installation. Keep an independent backup and do not use a destination that already contains content or live user data.

The plugin leads with blueprints — capturing a configured site as a reusable template (see Content blueprints). Publishing a finished site out, described below, is its secondary role: it is offered only on sites running inside a SpawnWP cockpit, and on an external destination the plugin instead offers to receive a published site.

Bringing an existing site into SpawnWP?

If your goal is to pull a WordPress site you already run into your SpawnWP lab, follow the step-by-step Import an existing WordPress site guide — it captures the site as a reusable blueprint you can spawn fresh environments from.

When this plugin fits

Use SpawnWP Deploy when all of these are true:

  • you want a one-time transfer rather than continuous synchronization;
  • the destination is a separate, fresh WordPress installation;
  • source and destination are WordPress single-site;
  • both use the exact same WordPress core and PHP major/minor versions;
  • both have PHP 7.4+, sodium, ZIP, trusted HTTPS and a reachable REST API;
  • both use directly writable local plugins, themes and uploads.

The transfer limit is 2 GiB. Multisite, object-storage uploads, database triggers or views, and symlinked content are not supported. Choose another migration method when these constraints do not fit your project.

Install the WordPress plugin

On a site created inside SpawnWP, the quickest way is to tick Install the SpawnWP Deploy plugin on the cockpit's Deploy page when you create the site — it arrives installed and activated from the latest stable WordPress.org release. The cockpit obtains that release through SpawnWP's Ed25519-verified mirror; if the server is offline it falls back to the stable copy bundled with SpawnWP. Otherwise install it by hand:

  1. Open SpawnWP Deploy on WordPress.org and install it from the WordPress dashboard, or download the latest stable ZIP.
  2. If you downloaded the ZIP, open Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin on the source site, upload it and activate it.
  3. Repeat the same WordPress plugin installation on the separate, fresh target site.
  4. Open Tools → SpawnWP Deploy in both WordPress dashboards.

Installing the plugin does not start a transfer.

Connect and transfer

  1. On the target WordPress site, generate a connection key. It expires after 15 minutes.
  2. Paste the key into the source WordPress site and run the compatibility checks.
  3. Review the result and explicitly confirm the transfer.

The source packages the database, plugins, themes and local uploads. It does not copy WordPress core, users, wp-config.php, MU plugins, drop-ins or SpawnWP development tools. The target keeps its own URL and administrator accounts.

Requests use per-connection Ed25519 signatures, timestamps, nonces, body hashes and checksummed resumable chunks. The target stages and verifies the package before activation, performs a health check and rolls back automatically if activation fails. The pre-transfer rollback is retained for seven days.

Capture a site as a blueprint

The plugin's main job is to capture the configured site as a reusable content blueprint on your own SpawnWP server: pair with a single-use code from the cockpit's System → Blueprint capture, choose what to capture, and press Create blueprint. See Content blueprints for the full flow, defaults and privacy guarantees.

What the plugin does not replace

SpawnWP Deploy is not a backup system, hosting service, staging platform or general synchronization tool. It does not provide repeated pushes, selective synchronization, live-data merging or publication to an existing site.

If a backup, another migration plugin, Git-based workflow or manual process is a better fit, use that instead. SpawnWP environments do not depend on this plugin.

Buy me a coffee