Introduction to TubePress
What TubePress is, the philosophy behind it, and how the CMS is put together.
Welcome to the TubePress documentation. TubePress is a free, self-hosted content management system for video tube sites. You download it, install it on your own server, and own everything — the code, the database, the videos and the audience. There are no license fees, no premium tiers, no usage caps and no ionCube-encoded files. Every line is readable, modern PHP.
This handbook covers the whole journey: installing TubePress, filling it with content, making it fast and good-looking, ranking and monetizing your videos, and — when you want them — plugging into the optional cloud services that power AI and the content catalogue.
What is TubePress?
TubePress is to tube sites what WordPress is to blogs: a complete, extensible platform that handles the hard parts — uploading and transcoding video, organising a large library, serving it quickly, ranking it, and turning it into revenue — while staying simple enough to run on commodity hosting.
It is built in pure PHP with no framework: no Composer runtime dependencies to break, no Node.js build step, no encoded blobs. It runs on an ordinary LAMP or LEMP stack (Apache or Nginx + PHP + MySQL/MariaDB). That makes it cheap to host, easy to audit and yours to modify.
| Principle | What it means for you |
|---|---|
| Free & self-hosted | No license fee, personal or commercial. Run as many sites as you like on your own servers. |
| Open, readable source | Plain PHP 8 — no ionCube, no encoding. Read it, change it, extend it. |
| Built for scale | Tested with libraries of hundreds of thousands of videos: chunked jobs, CTR ranking and a pseudo-cron that needs no system crontab. |
| No lock-in | Standard MySQL schema and files on disk. Back up, move host or export whenever you want. |
| Extensible | A WordPress-style theme and plugin system with action and filter hooks. |
What you can build
TubePress ships with everything a production tube site needs out of the box. The headline capabilities — each covered in depth later in these docs — are:
How TubePress is structured
Understanding the layout makes everything else easier. TubePress separates a fixed, updatable core from the add-ons you install and remove freely. Updates only ever touch the core, so your themes, plugins and content are never overwritten.
tubepress/
├── config/ App, database & install configuration
├── src/ The core engine (never edit to customise)
│ ├── Core/ App, Router, Database, CronManager, managers
│ ├── Auth/ Authentication & permission gate
│ ├── Models/ Video, Category, Performer, User, Setting…
│ ├── Admin/ Admin panel controllers
│ ├── Front/ Public-facing controllers
│ ├── Helpers/ Format, uploads, SEO, rate limiting…
│ ├── Plugin/ Hook system & plugin manager
│ └── Theme/ Theme manager & renderer
├── sql/ Numbered, auto-run database migrations
├── templates/ Admin panel & install wizard views
├── public/ Web root — index.php, uploads/
│
├── themes/ ← add-ons: drop-in themes (active: "simply")
├── plugins/ ← add-ons: drop-in plugins (agegate, backup, ctr)
└── lang/ Translation files (en, fr, de, es, ar…)You will meet each of these areas in the Architecture reference. For now, remember the golden rule: customise through themes, plugins and settings — never by editing the core.
Free software, optional cloud services
The CMS itself is completely free and works entirely on its own. Separately, you can link your site to a free tubepress.io account to unlock optional, pay-as-you-go cloud services that would otherwise require you to run heavy infrastructure yourself:
- The content catalogue — import from a library of 400,000+ ready-to-publish videos instead of scraping your own.
- AI features — generate titles, descriptions and translations through a managed AI proxy.
- The marketplace — install licensed premium plugins and themes.
- Support & announcements — open tickets and receive product updates from inside the admin panel.
These services are billed with prepaid credits, and new accounts start with 150 free credits. Nothing here is required to run a tube site — it is there when you want to move faster. See Connecting your account for the full picture.
How this documentation is organised
The sidebar groups the docs by what you are trying to do:
- Getting started — requirements, installation and your first day.
- The admin panel & content — the day-to-day of running the library.
- Importing, media & appearance — filling the site, transcoding and styling it.
- SEO & growth — ranking, monetization and languages.
- Your account, users & administration — cloud services, members, security and upkeep.
- Developer reference — architecture, hooks, the theme API and CLI.
- Reference & help — the full settings list, troubleshooting and FAQ.
Use the filter box at the top of the sidebar (press /) to jump straight to any page.
Where to go next
Still stuck?
Open a ticket from your dashboard and our team will help you out.