Developer shares self-deleting PHP deploy workers for a 1,000-page site with no SSH access

The author runs The DJ Calendar, roughly 1,000 PHP/MySQL pages on shared cPanel hosting without shell access, SSH, or a deployment pipeline. Their hosting caches HTML for five minutes and opcache serves stale output briefly after writes, making manual code pasting through a browser file manager risky. To address this, they built a worker pattern: a single PHP file uploaded to the web root and triggered once with a secret token, which applies the change and then deletes itself. The approach includes safeguards such as verifiers that check exactly what a patch writes, with automatic restoration on failure, and an 18-rule pre-flight checklist. The author open-sourced the project under the MIT license and invites readers to share their own techniques for working safely with no shell access during a production incident.