Commands

Introduction

Commands are saved, named snippets that you can run against a site on demand. They are handy for repeatable maintenance tasks, such as clearing a cache, running a migration, or rebuilding assets, without having to open a terminal each time.

Each command runs in the site's root directory, as the site's isolated user, so it has exactly the same access and environment as your site.

Creating a command

Give the command a name and the command to run. A command can be a single line or a small multi-line script. Once saved, it appears in the site's Commands list and can be run at any time.

Running a command

When you run a command, Vito executes it on the server as a background job and streams the output back in real time. Each run is recorded, so you can review the output and status of previous executions.

Default Commands

Specific site types come with default commands out of the box. For example, a Laravel site is created with these artisan commands ready to run:

• cache
  — php artisan cache:clear
• down — php artisan down --retry=5 --refresh=6 --quiet (enable maintenance mode)
• up — php artisan up (disable maintenance mode)

You can edit, remove, or add to these like any other command.

Environment

Commands run with the same environment as your deployment script, so the same variables are available, including:

SITE_PATH=[path to the website]
DOMAIN=[domain name]
BRANCH=[branch name]
REPOSITORY=[repository]
COMMIT_ID=[last deployed commit id]
PHP_VERSION=[the php version your site is running]
PHP_PATH=[path to the php your site is running]

The php alias also resolves to the site's configured PHP version, so php runs the correct version automatically.

Installed tooling

Commands have access to any Site Tooling you have installed for the site. Because commands run as the site's isolated user with the tooling on the PATH, runtimes and package managers such as node, npm, bun, yarn, and pnpm can be used directly in a command, for example:

npm ci && npm run build

The versions used are whatever you have installed for the site through Site Tooling.

Variables

Like Scripts, commands support variables. Define a variable with the ${VARIABLE_NAME} format, and Vito will prompt you for its value each time you run the command. This lets you reuse a single command with different inputs.