Manager Connector for Craft CMS

Reports operational metadata from a Craft CMS 4 or 5 installation to Manager for Craft over signed, outbound-only requests.

Requires PHP 8.1+ and Craft CMS 4.4+ or 5.0+.

What it does

• Generates an ED25519 keypair on your server. The private key never leaves it.
• Signs every request it sends, so the platform can prove it came from this installation.
• Reports version numbers, update availability, licence state and similar operational metadata.

What it cannot do

These are not promises about intent; they are properties of the code.

|---|---| | No inbound endpoint | The plugin registers no site or control-panel route that accepts management input. Every exchange is started by this plugin, outbound. It works from behind NAT with no inbound firewall rules. | | No remote execution | There is no console-command runner, no PHP evaluation, no SQL, no shell, no arbitrary file access. Jobs come from a closed registry, and this plugin refuses any type it does not itself implement - so a compromised platform cannot make your site do something new. | | No credentials held | Manager never receives an administrator password, an SSH credential or a database password. There is nowhere in its schema to put one. | | No site content | What may be transmitted is fixed by a shared schema. The platform rejects anything outside it rather than quietly discarding the extra. |

What it reports

Version numbers, plugin and Composer package names and versions, a handful of safe configuration booleans, queue and migration counts, locally-computed licence state, and an environment classification.

Never entries, assets, user records, password hashes, sessions, logs, environment-variable values, security keys, licence keys, API credentials, database credentials or configuration file contents.

Do not take that on trust. See exactly what your site would send:

php craft manager-connector/preview

Documentation

Full documentation is at managerforcraft.com/docs; its source lives in the docs folder of this repository. This README is the short version. The docs go deeper on pairing, exactly what is and is not sent, what each capability permits, how backups work, the security model, the console commands, and troubleshooting.

Requirements

• Craft CMS 4.4 or later, or Craft CMS 5.0 or later
• PHP 8.1 or later (Craft 4 itself runs on 8.0.2+, but this plugin does not - see the changelog for why)
• A Manager installation to report to, self-hosted or Manager Cloud

Installation

composer require coysh-digital/craft-manager-connector
php craft plugin/install manager-connector

Installing does not create a config file, and the plugin runs without one - you are asked for the platform address on the pairing screen instead. Creating it is optional and recommended:

// config/manager-connector.php
return [
    'platformUrl' => 'https://manager.example.org',
];

Copy vendor/coysh-digital/craft-manager-connector/src/config.php if you want the commented version of every option.

Kept in version control rather than in the database on purpose: pointing a site at a different Manager platform should take a deployment. With it set, the pairing screen shows the address as fixed, so this site cannot be repointed from the control panel. It is also the only place a recovery key fingerprint can be pinned - see Backups.

Pairing

Ask your administrator for a single-use enrolment code, then:

php craft manager-connector/pair mgr_enrol_...

The code is valid once and expires quickly. If the host this site serves from differs from the domain the platform expected, pairing is held until a person confirms it - nothing is reported in the meantime.

Scheduling

*/5  * * * *  cd /path/to/site && php craft manager-connector/heartbeat
*/5  * * * *  cd /path/to/site && php craft manager-connector/jobs
0    * * * *  cd /path/to/site && php craft manager-connector/report
17   4 * * *  cd /path/to/site && php craft manager-connector/updates

Scheduling is optional and takes the commands out of the queue. The plugin works just fine without cronjobs.

The heartbeat carries no data at all. Hourly is plenty for the inventory report, since version numbers only change when you deploy. The update check runs daily and at an odd minute, so a fleet of sites does not all ask Craft's update service at once.

jobs is what makes anything the platform asks for actually happen. Nothing is pushed to your site — the platform has no way to reach it - so this is the site choosing to ask.

Commands

Command	Purpose
manager-connector/pair <code>	Pair with a platform
manager-connector/heartbeat	Report liveness
manager-connector/report	Send an inventory report
manager-connector/updates	Check for updates and report what is available
manager-connector/jobs	Ask the platform whether there is anything to do, and do it
manager-connector/preview	Print what would be sent, without sending it
manager-connector/status	Show the current connection
manager-connector/disconnect	Delete this site's signing key

Pairing and disconnection are console commands rather than buttons. Both are deliberate acts by someone with server access, and behind a button a hijacked control-panel session could hand a platform access to your site, or take it away.

Disconnecting

php craft manager-connector/disconnect

The keypair is deleted outright rather than flagged, so there is nothing to reactivate. Reconnecting needs a new enrolment code. Revoke the connector in Manager as well, so the platform stops expecting it.