Administrator Guide

Stream Engine Administrator Guide

This guide is for the person responsible for the complete lifecycle of a Stream Engine site: preparing the host, installing the application, configuring the site, keeping it healthy, recovering it, updating it, and removing it when it is no longer required.

You do not need to understand the PHP implementation. You should be comfortable using your hosting control panel or a command-line session, managing a database, protecting credentials, and checking service logs. When a task requires elevated operating-system or database privileges, the guide says so explicitly.

Important

Stream Engine is under active development and is not yet recommended for production use. Test installation, backup, restore, and upgrade procedures in a non-production environment before relying on them for a public site.

Current chapters

1. Requirements — choose a deployment model and prepare PHP, MySQL or MariaDB, Memcached, the web server, storage, and the task scheduler.
2. Installation — install a release with Composer, configure Nginx and PHP-FPM, run the protected web installer or CLI installer, and verify the result.
3. Initial configuration — configure the deployment environment, email, cache, uploads, site identity, branding, registration, and CAPTCHA.
4. Content, pages, and routing — create content, expose it through safe routes and page actions, control access, add navigation, and verify sitemap behavior.
5. Users and permissions — operate accounts, assign global roles, suspend access, protect administrator continuity, and distinguish page, content, ownership, and community rules.
6. Appearance, navigation, and files — select and preview themes, manage branding, menus and widgets, and operate the local uploads File Browser safely.
7. Scheduler and background tasks — configure a once-per-minute runner, control registered tasks, inspect execution history, and diagnose delayed or failed work.
8. Routine operations — monitor the application and its dependencies, review logs, queues, capacity, accounts, migrations, and updates, and follow daily, weekly, and monthly checklists.
9. Backups and restore — protect every persistent state component with external tooling, retain encrypted off-host copies, and practise isolated and production recovery.
10. Upgrades and rollback — evaluate and rehearse a release, coordinate backups, writers, migrations, caches, and smoke tests, and restore matching code, database, and files when rollback is required.
11. Troubleshooting — diagnose symptoms by separating proxy, PHP, database, cache, filesystem, scheduler, mail, upload, theme, and deployment failures while preserving safe evidence.
12. Uninstallation — retire or permanently remove a site through a final recovery set, controlled shutdown, exact resource deletion, credential revocation, and external verification.

Lifecycle coverage

The guide now covers the full administrator lifecycle from host preparation through permanent removal. Commands and provider-specific operations must still be rehearsed against the deployment model used by the site before they are relied on in production.

Administrative boundaries

Stream Engine manages site content and application settings. The site operator remains responsible for the surrounding platform, including:

• operating-system and container security updates;
• TLS certificates, DNS, firewall rules, and reverse proxies;
• database, Memcached, SMTP, and local upload-storage availability;
• scheduled execution of the Stream Engine task runner;
• monitoring, capacity, and log retention; and
• backup scheduling, off-host storage, and restore testing.

The engine does not implement its own backup scheduler. The backup chapter provides operating-system and container examples for protecting all required state with external tooling.

Conventions used by this guide

• /srv/stream-engine is the example production application directory. Replace it with the absolute path used by your deployment.
• www-data is the example PHP-FPM service account. Replace it when your distribution or hosting platform uses another account.
• example.com and example credentials are placeholders. Never use them as production secrets.
• Commands are shown for a POSIX shell unless a section names another environment.
• A warning marked destructive identifies a command or operation that can permanently remove data.

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