webdna / craft-siteseer

1.1.0 2026-10-20 14:58 UTC

Requires

• php: >=8.2
• craftcms/cms: ^5.3.0

proprietary

Published on Packagist.org on 2026-10-20 14:58 UTC

README

Visit all the pages, check them, prepare them for others and maybe take a little snapshot or two to remember it by.

Requirements

This plugin requires Craft CMS 5.3.0 or later, and PHP 8.2 or later.

Installation

You can install this plugin from the Plugin Store or with Composer.

From the Plugin Store

Go to the Plugin Store in your project’s Control Panel and search for “Siteseer”. Then press “Install”.

With Composer

Open your terminal and run the following commands:

# go to the project directory
cd /path/to/my-project.test

# tell Composer to load the plugin
composer require webdna/craft-siteseer

# tell Craft to install the plugin
./craft plugin/install siteseer

Usage

The plugin is almost exclusively used from its utilities menu. The siteseer utility allows the configuration of a collection destinations, an itinerary of sorts. You can specifiy which sites it should plan to visit, then specify by section, products (requires commerce), category groups too (retro!). You may add any uris you like in the manual URIs table. Static uris can also be added using the config file, for pages without a CMS presence.

Clicking the 'Run a scan' button will then convert your itinerary into a series of queue jobs, which will take place in the background. Once finished you can return to the utilities page to see a summary of any errors found during the trip. From the table you can visit the problem url, find out more about its error code, visit its edit page in the CP (if available) and delete the record once you have addressed the problem.

From the command line

Everything the utility can visit, ./craft siteseer/visit can visit too (siteseer/default/visit is the same command), so a scan can run after a deploy or on a schedule.

# every section, category group and product type, on every site, visited now
./craft siteseer/visit

# two sections, queued as the utility's "Run a scan" button does
./craft siteseer/visit --sections=news,blog --groups= --types= --queue

# a few static pages plus the config file's URIs, on one site
./craft siteseer/visit --sites=default --sections= --groups= --types= --manual=contact,about --include-config

Option
--sites, --sections, --groups, --types	Comma-separated handles or IDs, or *. Left out: all of them. Given empty (--sections=): none.
--manual	Comma-separated URIs, visited on every chosen site.
--include-config	Also visit the manualUris from config/siteseer.php.
--snapshot	Delete the existing snapshots and take new ones.
--queue	Push batched queue jobs (one per site) and return, instead of visiting now.

Without --queue the pages are visited in the command's own process, one line per URL, which can take a while on a large site. The run ends with a summary and exits 1 when any page did not answer 200, so a deploy script or scheduler can act on it. An unknown handle or ID exits 64 before anything is visited. Either way, every failure is saved to the utility's error table.

Experimental Dev features

The plugin also offers the ability to take html snapshots of the pages that are visited in dev mode only. This hopes to address for developers the difficulty in testing functionality of sites that use static caching on their production hosting. This is not a production worthy static caching solution.

Use this however you please but our use case was to try and address the difficulty in testing certain functionality on sites that use static caching on their production hosting, which was not trivially replicated locally. You can do a little server rewrite in ddev to serve the static html versions of the pages from an extra subdomain. The necessary starter files are located in /resources. Place the cors.conf file inside .ddev/nginx and the sscache.conf file inside .ddev/nginx_full and update the domain in each.

Add the extra hostname to ddev

    ...
    additional_hostnames: ["sscache.<domain>"]
    ...

then run

    ddev restart

You can then run a scan with snapshots turned on. Once finished you can navigate to one of these pages with the sscache subdomain and see the saved page. If it has set up correctly you should see a yellow banner across the top with "This is a cached page generated at YYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS".

NB: If you are using http only for whatever reason, you can set

'useHttps' => false

in the siteseer.php config file.