Hosting, Config, and Going Live

Customising & Hosting

Deploying Nano CMS is deliberately boring - which is the point.

What you need

  • PHP 8.1+ with the image extension (GD or Imagick)
  • Apache with mod_rewrite (for the clean URLs)
  • SFTP access. That's it - no Node, no Composer, no database server.

The shape of a deployment

/public_html/blog/        ← the frontend (and admin, while publishing)
/blog-config/             ← OUTSIDE the webroot: config.json, rate-limit.json

Keeping config.json above the webroot is the one rule that matters: it holds your password hash and licence key, so it must never be web-accessible. The installer sets this up for you and now picks a per-domain config folder automatically, so multiple sites on one account never collide.

Going live

Upload over SFTP, run the setup wizard, publish, then remove the admin folder. Updating later is just re-uploading the frontend - your template.php design and your content are untouched.

Backups stay a one-line rsync. The whole site is files on disk.