Before starting, you should have set up a new site in your hosting manager and ideally have an empty database. You may also apply these instructions to an existing website, including legacy versions of October CMS, however, please make sure you have taken a complete backup in case something goes wrong.

Control Panel Setup

After installing this plugin, navigate to the Settings > Deploy in your October CMS control panel and click Create Server.

1. Enter the web address for your site (eg: https://mycpanelwebsite.tld/)
2. Generate a new RSA private key, or enter an existing one to set up an existing server
3. Download the Beacon ZIP files

Beacon Deployment

In your Beacon ZIP file, you should notice the following files:

• index.php
• bootstrap/app.php
• bootstrap/autoload.php
• bootstrap/beacon.php

You can upload these files anywhere and they will become a target for deployment of October CMS. You can use FTP or the file manager in your hosting control panel.

Important: The directory where the files are uploaded must be writable by your web server (eg: permission 755 for apache).

Run Your First Deployment

Once you have the Beacon installed remotely and the server set up locally. It's time to perform your first deployment.

Troubleshooting Beacon the Response

Sometimes you may see an error that a valid response from a beacon was not found.

The first thing to try is the "Check Beacon" link to make sure the beacon is Active, if it says Unreachable, try downloading the beacon files and uploading them again to your server.

You can perform more advanced troubleshooting by capturing the raw response from the server or beacon. To capture the raw response from the beacon, do the following.

1. Add ?debug=1 to the end of the URL in the backend.
2. Click Check beacon.
3. Check the log file in storage/logs to see what the server is responding with.

This should hopefully provide some insight in to why the response was not accepted.

Using .deployignore to Ignore Files

There are times when you don't want specific files to be deployed, such as the node_modules directory used in plugins and themes. This is possible by creating a .deployignore file in the base directory of your plugin or theme. This file behaves the same as .gitignore file where you can configure Git to ignore files you don't want to check in.

The following .deployignore file will exclude the node_modules directory:

node_modules/

The file must be located at the base directory of the theme or plugin. For example:

• themes/demo/.deployignore
• plugins/acme/demo/.deployignore