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A site is always added to a server, and only to one that hosts sites — application or web. The site starts serving a holding page straight away. You can add the repository now or later, and nothing is deployed until you ask for it.

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Domain

The primary hostname. Other names it should answer on are aliases, added afterwards. The domain is also the name of the site’s directory on the machine, of its nginx file, and of its log files, so it is worth getting right the first time.

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What it is

The site kind — Laravel, WordPress, a static build, something proxied to a port. It picks the web directory and the routing, and both stay changeable afterwards. A proxied kind asks for a port. Node frameworks default to 3000; a plain proxied site could be anything, so it asks.

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Repository and branch

Optional at this stage. If you have connected a source control account, you can pick a repository from a list and Shipways installs the site’s deploy key for you. Otherwise type an address. A bare owner/repository means GitHub; paste a full SSH or HTTPS URL for anything else, and add the deploy key to the repository yourself.

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Root and web directory

Root directory is where the application lives inside the repository. Deploy scripts run here, and it is where composer.json and artisan are looked for. / for an ordinary repository, /apps/api for one directory of a monorepo. Web directory is what nginx serves, relative to the root directory. The kind fills it in — /public for Laravel and Symfony, / for most of the rest. They hang together: an application in apps/api served from /public is served from apps/api/public.

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PHP version

Only asked for when the kind runs PHP. The choices are the versions installed on that server.

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Connecting a database

Optional, and worth doing here rather than later. Create a new database makes one on the server, plus an account for this site with a password Shipways generates. The credentials are written straight into the site’s environment file on the first deploy, so there is nothing to copy across. Use an existing one points this site at a database another site already uses. Both read and write the same data, but this one connects as its own account, so it can be shut out later without touching the other.
The environment file is seeded once, on the first deploy, and never touched again. That is the only moment Shipways can fill in a working DB_ block — attach a database afterwards and you will be editing the environment file yourself.

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What happens on save

The directories and the nginx file are created, and the site serves a holding page. That page is recorded as a deployment called initial, which means the site always has something to fall back to if a first real deploy fails its health check.