The intended setup:
Quiet local hardware & your favorite LLM
Clockwork Control is designed to sit on a quiet, dedicated machine on your local office network—paired with whatever AI coding tool you love—so you can manage your fleet, build custom modules, and give back to the community.
Why a $400 M1 Mac Mini is the ultimate agency command center
You don’t need an enterprise cloud cluster or expensive multi-tenant SaaS subscriptions to manage a fleet of 50, 100, or 250+ WordPress sites. Compact, power-efficient local hardware is ideal.
Apple Silicon Mac Mini (M1/M2/M3) or Intel NUC
16GB RAM is the sweet spot for smooth local Laravel queues, database cache, and IDE / LLM workflows.
~5 to 10 Watts
Sips power silently on an office desk or network shelf. Costs less than $1–$2 in electricity per month.
100% Private on Your LAN
Client API keys, hosting tokens, and origin IP maps remain behind your firewall—never uploaded to a SaaS cloud.
$0.00 Forever
Manage 20, 50, or 250+ client websites across any number of hosts without per-site rental meters.
Keep your agency’s most sensitive keys inside your own walls
When managing client infrastructure, your API secret tokens for SpinupWP, Pressable, WP Engine, Kinsta, Cloudways, and DigitalOcean represent full administrative control over your clients’ production servers.
With Clockwork Control running on your own Mac Mini or NUC, those tokens never leave your local office network. Background workers connect directly from your IP address to provider APIs and origin web servers.
The reality of SSH: Why you must never run this on a public server
SSH is the ultimate administrative backplane for WordPress fleet management. But storing SSH keys on an internet-exposed machine turns that machine into an open target for automated bots.
The "Master Key" Danger
Clockwork Control orchestrates remote WP-CLI runners, diagnostic scripts, and server updates across your entire fleet. To do this, it holds SSH private keys and API tokens. If an attacker gains access to this machine, they don’t compromise one site — they hold the keys to every client server in your agency.
Internet Bots & Port Scanners
Any server with a public IP is hammered 24/7 by Shodan, Censys, credential-stuffing botnets, and zero-day web vulnerability scanners. Putting a mission-critical control panel with master fleet credentials directly on the public web creates unnecessary, unacceptable exposure.
Zero Inbound Ports Needed
Clockwork Control needs zero open inbound ports. It communicates purely via outbound socket requests to provider APIs and origin web servers. By running on a local office Mac Mini or behind Tailscale, the machine is completely invisible to public internet scanners.
Need off-site access for your team without exposing a public port?
Install Tailscale or WireGuard on your local Mac Mini or office machine. Your team gets secure, end-to-end encrypted access to the dashboard from anywhere with zero port-forwarding, zero public DNS records, and zero internet exposure.
Claude, Gemini, Gemma, or local Ollama — who cares?
We don’t believe in proprietary AI lock-in or vendor-specific prompt pipelines. Clockwork Control is engineered from the ground up with clean PHP interfaces and strict test coverage so any modern LLM can inspect, scaffold, and extend it.
Claude Code / Claude 3.7
Runs directly in your terminal, inspects Composer path modules, runs Pest tests, and edits code autonomously.
Gemini CLI / Antigravity
Deep multi-file codebase reasoning, massive context windows, and instant workspace search for Laravel.
Gemma / Local Ollama
Run Gemma, Llama, or Qwen completely offline on Apple Silicon Unified Memory without external API calls.
Cursor & Windsurf
Inline prompt-driven edits, instant composer package navigation, and instant test verification in editor.
Strict PHP contracts + 1,500 tests = High-precision AI synthesis
Most codebases fall apart when paired with AI because they lack architectural boundaries. In Clockwork Control, every integration implements strict contracts like HostingProviderContract and lives in its own path repository under modules/.
When you hand your model an existing module (like SpinupWP or Pressable) and the API docs of a new host, the AI has a clear template to follow. You run php artisan test, and any contract mismatch or missing method is surfaced instantly.
Build what your agency needs, then give back to everyone
Here is how agency owners and technical operators use Clockwork Control to solve their immediate hosting fleet challenges while expanding the open-source ecosystem.
Run Quietly on Your Own Local Machine
Clockwork Control spins up in minutes on an M1 Mac Mini or local office server via Homebrew PHP, Composer, and SQLite or MySQL. It sits on your LAN, probing origin SSL certificates and polling your client fleet effortlessly.
Prompt Your Favorite LLM to Build Modules
Need an integration for a regional host, custom VPS provider, or internal telemetry tool? Ask your favorite LLM to implement Clockwork Control’s HostingProviderContract inside modules/[YourProvider]/. With 1,500 tests in place, your model writes clean, production-ready code in minutes.
Give Back to the Agency Community
Open a Pull Request to our repository. Once verified, your module is merged and featured in the official public directory feed (/api/modules.json)—giving your agency public recognition while helping other agencies escape SaaS vendor lock-in.
The 1-prompt setup: Let your AI do the heavy lifting
Instead of manually copying and running terminal commands, paste this prompt directly into Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Cursor, or Windsurf. Your AI agent handles the entire local deployment autonomously.
Clone and set up Clockwork Control locally on this machine for me:
1. Clone the repository:
git clone https://github.com/clockwork-web-dev/clockwork-control-panel.git && cd clockwork-control-panel
2. Verify environment prerequisites:
- PHP 8.4+ with extensions: curl, mbstring, openssl, pdo_sqlite or pdo_mysql, pcntl
- Composer 2+
- Node.js 20+ and npm
3. Run automated setup & configure environment:
- Run: composer setup
(Installs dependencies, copies .env, generates APP_KEY, runs migrations, and builds frontend assets)
4. Verify the test suite:
- Run: php artisan test
- Confirm all 1,500 tests pass cleanly with 0 failures
5. Provision the initial agency admin user:
- Ask me for my agency email and name, then run:
php artisan clockwork:add-user [email] --name="[name]"
6. Launch the local application & queue scheduler:
- Run: php artisan serve --port=8000
- Run: php artisan schedule:work (in background)
- Open http://127.0.0.1:8000 and verify the dashboard renders cleanly.Everything about running locally & building modules
Why specifically an M1 Mac Mini with 16GB of RAM?
An Apple Silicon M1 Mac Mini (often found used or refurbished for ~$400) is arguably the greatest homelab and office server ever made. It consumes only 5–10 watts at idle, produces virtually zero heat or fan noise, and its 16GB of Unified Memory gives you plenty of headroom to run Clockwork Control, background queue workers, and even local LLM models (like Gemma or Llama via Ollama) on the exact same box.
Why can't I just deploy this on a public cloud VPS like a $5 droplet?
Because Clockwork Control holds SSH private keys, provider API tokens, and administrative credentials for your agency's entire client fleet, running it on a public-facing IP address exposes your mission-critical infrastructure to automated internet bots, Shodan scanners, brute-force dictionary attacks, and zero-day web exploits. It is strictly architected as a private LAN appliance with zero open inbound ports. If you must run on cloud hardware, you must isolate it behind a private network like Tailscale with all public ingress ports blocked.
Does my local server need to be exposed to the public internet?
No! Clockwork Control reaches OUT to provider APIs (SpinupWP, Pressable, WP Engine, Kinsta, Cloudways, DigitalOcean, Azure) and probes origin web servers via outbound sockets. You do not need inbound port forwarding. If your agency team needs access from home or while traveling, run Tailscale or WireGuard for secure, encrypted point-to-point networking in 2 minutes.
Which LLM works best for extending Clockwork Control?
Who cares? Use whichever model you love. Claude Code, Gemini CLI, Cursor, Windsurf, or local open weights with Ollama (Gemma, Llama) all excel. Because Clockwork Control is architected with strict, typed PHP contracts and Composer path repositories, any modern AI coding tool can read the interface, inspect a reference module like modules/SpinupWP/, and generate clean, tested code.
How does giving back to the community work?
Clockwork Control is a collaborative open-source ecosystem. When you build a module for a provider that isn't yet in core, submit a Pull Request to our GitHub repository. We review the implementation and test coverage, merge it into the monorepo, and list your agency in the official directory feed (/api/modules.json).
Ready to set up your agency’s local command center?
Clone the repository onto your Mac Mini or office machine, run migrations, and start managing all your client WordPress hosting in one private place.
