Frequently asked questions

A content management system written in PHP, free and open source, that runs without a database. It includes caching, SEO, GEO (visibility in AI answers), security and an optional AI assistant, in a 402 KB archive. It installs in 3 minutes on shared hosting.

Yes, completely. Éclair is distributed under the MIT license: you can use it, modify it and redistribute it, including for commercial use or client sites, as long as you keep the copyright notice. Only the optional AI assistant has a cost: that of your own API key.

Business websites, blogs, freelancer portfolios and sales pages: for freelancers, craftspeople, nonprofits and small businesses. It isn’t designed for online stores, member areas or forums.

Thierry Gustin, an SEO consultant since 2014, based in Madrid. The code is public on GitHub and open to bug reports and contributions.

The admin is available in 7 languages (French, English, Spanish, German, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese and Chinese) and the public site in 6 languages (French, Spanish, English, German, Italian and Portuguese).

Hosting with PHP 8.1 or later (8.3 recommended) and Apache or LiteSpeed, which almost every shared host offers: o2switch, OVH, Hostinger, IONOS, PlanetHoster… Nginx works too with the provided configuration. See the installation guide.

No. Your content, settings and accounts are stored in protected files in the data folder. There’s no database to create, no credentials to enter and no database to back up.

About 3 minutes: upload the folder to your hosting, open your site’s URL and answer the wizard’s 4 questions. With o2switch, allow 15 minutes, including adding the domain and the HTTPS certificate (o2switch guide).

Yes. Éclair automatically detects the folder it’s installed in: example.com/site/ or blog.example.com work with no configuration.

Yes, on your computer with XAMPP, MAMP, Laragon or PHP’s built-in server: install Éclair locally.

Éclair doesn’t impose a limit, but it’s designed for sites with anywhere from a few pages to a few hundred pieces of content: business websites, blogs and portfolios. For a catalog of thousands of product pages, a CMS with a database will be a better fit.

Yes. It generates a sitemap, JSON-LD structured data, canonical and Open Graph tags, creates automatic 301 redirects, notifies Bing through IndexNow and scores every piece of content live in the editor. Details in the SEO documentation.

Not without modifying the theme: Éclair doesn’t include any third-party analytics tool, and its security policy (CSP) blocks external scripts. That’s what allows it to set no cookies at all, and therefore show no cookie banner. To track your visibility, Google Search Console works without any script; your host often provides visitor statistics too.

Yes: main color, fonts, logo, icon and dark mode are set in Settings › Appearance. To go further, you can edit the theme’s PHP templates and CSS, as this site does (developer page).

Yes. Each piece of content has its own language and you link its translations: Éclair adds the hreflang tags and a “Read in…” link to the other versions.

It’s designed for a hostile environment: no database (so no SQL injection), Argon2id password hashing, brute-force protection, two-factor authentication, sanitized content and a strict Content-Security-Policy. An offensive security review found 17 vulnerabilities, all fixed before release. See Éclair’s security.

In the admin, go to Security › Download a backup: you get a ZIP archive of your content (data) and your images (media). Without the zip extension, copy these two folders via FTP.

After making a backup, replace the app and assets folders, along with index.php and .htaccess, with the ones from the new version, then clear the cache. Your content and images are never touched. See the full procedure.

Another administrator can reset it from Users. Otherwise, use FTP to create a data/reset.php file containing your email and a new password, then log in with them within 24 hours. The exact steps are in troubleshooting.

No. The assistant uses your own API key from Anthropic (Claude) or OpenAI (ChatGPT): you pay the provider for what you actually use, with no middleman. A full post costs about $0.24 with Claude Opus 5.5 and less than $0.01 with Claude Haiku 5.5.

No. It prepares drafts, suggests changes and creates images, but it can’t publish, delete, or touch the settings, menus or accounts. Publishing always takes a human click.

No, it stays off until you enter an API key. Éclair works perfectly without it. 5-minute setup: the AI assistant.