Skip to content
Grav 2.1 is out: every page speaks Markdown. Read the announcement →

Multi-site health/status monitor for GRAV

admin plugin

Started by lynbor 5 days ago · 2 replies · 112 views
5 days ago

Hi all,

I run a small web design and hosting business (Designing Results) and manage a handful of GRAV sites for clients — a mix of 1.7 and a new 2.0 build I'm working on. I got tired of logging into each site's Admin panel one at a time just to check "is this backed up, is anything out of date, is it even online," so I built myself a small monitoring dashboard to do it from one place. I'm calling it GRAVmon.

What it currently does, at a glance for every site:

  • Online/offline check
  • Last backup time, with a warning if it's gotten stale
  • GRAV core version, with an accurate "update available" flag (correctly handles the 1.7→2.0 jump as a separate "major upgrade" note rather than nagging about it like a routine patch)
  • Installed plugin versions, checked against what's actually current
  • Cache size and when content was last edited
  • One-click refresh per site or all at once

How it works: it's a small standalone PHP/JSON app (no database) you run yourself, plus a lightweight companion script you drop onto each site you want to monitor — that script just reads existing GRAV files (nothing modified, nothing installed) and reports back to the dashboard over a simple authenticated request. It already handles both GRAV 1.7 and 2.0 sites side by side.

I've been using it daily for a few weeks now, and it's been genuinely useful — caught a month-old backup gap and an overwritten custom.css after a theme update, among other things.

I'm thinking about cleaning it up and putting it on GitHub for anyone else managing multiple GRAV sites, and possibly building a proper version of it as an actual GRAV plugin down the road (especially once more sites are on 2.0 and its REST API is more broadly usable).

Before I put more time into that — would something like this be useful to anyone else here? I'm curious whether there's appetite for this at all versus everyone already having their own way of handling it.

Thanks for reading — happy to answer questions.

👍 1
2 days ago

This sounds great.

I monitor a lot of client WordPress sites with MainWP, and am gradually migrating them to Grav so this would be very helpful.

2 days ago

Yay, I have a few WP clients and monitor them with the InfinateWP plugin. And I'm so sick of all the plugins and updates, etc associated with WP setups. GRAV is so much easier to work in than WP, at least for someone not interested in learning every detail about a CMS.

I love that it's a flat file system and really, really love how I can zip up the user folder and, via that, move a site design from a local setup to a live setup with the click of a button most of the time. And now, with V2 and the MCP connection, using Claude to dictate changes on a site and it does it- that is HUGE! Over the years, I've played with several different "flat file" website tools just trying to find something simple enough that I can actually train a website owner on how to do updates to their website themselves, though it seems nobody really wants to do that. But at least with GRAV it is plausible.

Anyways, I'm still kind of developing this little tool. PM me with your email, and when I have something I feel comfortable distributing, I'll shoot it over to you.

If I get enough interest, I'll set it up on github or something for people to grab from there. Who knows, I might get some good idea feedback for functions or features to add. But with MCP, it might be a nice tool, but a bit too late in the game. :-)

Suggested topics

Topic Participants Replies Views Activity
General · by jeremycherfas, 1 week ago
4 173 1 day ago
General · by Old Man Umby, 1 week ago
1 96 1 week ago
General · by Sebastian, 1 week ago
1 120 1 week ago
General · by Andy Miller, 3 weeks ago
0 246 3 weeks ago
General · by ready-4-IT, 6 months ago
1 737 3 weeks ago