Learn three ways to access WordPress files on xCloud: the built-in file manager, SFTP with FileZilla on port 22, and SSH with public-key authentication. The video shows how to upload keys in the dashboard, activate them per site, and use sudo for admin tasks.
Chapters
There will always be a time when you need to log directly into your WordPress site and manage files. Maybe you need to upload a Google verification file, or upload a very large file, or delete something. Who knows? The time will come. And in this video, I'm going to show you several different ways to do it. We're going to start with the easiest and move to the more adventurous. So we're going to start with the built-in file manager that is provided by xCloud. So I'm here looking at my panel. I'm going to choose a site. And then in the left-hand side, there's Access Data, and there's the file manager. And it's turned off by default, but you simply click this button, turn it on. There we are. It is important to note that they don't work with the 7G/8G firewall. So if you have those on, this isn't going to work. But if you don't, you simply click Launch File Manager and there we are. And it's a pretty standard file manager. Here are all your folders and files on the right. You can delete, edit, copy, get a direct link to them. Uh, if you click on one, there is all of your files. And that's really all there is to it. I'm going to edit the README real quick by clicking on it. Um, and actually it views it when you click it, but you can click here to edit. Um, there's an advanced editor, you can download it, et cetera. Up at the top right, you can upload, you can create a new item. There are some settings, there's a help, there's a search here. Uh, it's a full-featured file manager and you can do anything you need to with it. You can even change file permissions here. But next, I'm going to show you how to do this with SFTP, and for that Again, under Access Data, we're going to click SSH/SFTP, and, uh, down here at the bottom there's SSH Authentication, and you can choose public key, which we'll do in a few minutes, or just a plain password. So if you do password, you just set one right here and click Save. And then your password is set. So now I'm going to switch here to FileZilla, and you can either fill out this little form at the top, or you can, uh, open this and create something that you can use over and over again. It takes the same information, so I'm going to just use the form at the top. So for the host, I'm actually going to use the IP address here. You click it and it copies, so we put that in there. And here's our username, and I typed in the password that I created, and the port is 22, and then hit quick connect, and it's doing an SSH negotiation, and so there is a key happening. I'm going to always trust this host, and then it won't ask this again. And there we are. We're logged in. Um, your WordPress site is under the files folder. And if you're familiar with an SFTP client, maybe you have your favorite one, everything's perfectly normal. It's just a normal SFTP session. But now I want to show you how to do SSH. Which is my personal favorite. You need to upload an SSH key, a public key, and there are a variety of places you can do that. You can do it right here, or I'm going to open in another tab. Uh, we're going to go to Settings and then SSH Key. And you can see I have none here. Now, keys uploaded anywhere are available everywhere. Not turned on. That's key. See what I did there? But they are available everywhere. So I'll show you what I mean. I'm going to add one here and I'm just going to give it a name. And now I need to copy my key. So then you paste it right here. Um, so then you can choose to always provision to new servers or not, and then you can choose what servers to push this key to. I'm going to do both of mine. I've chosen my two servers, and you need to put in a default sudo user and a default sudo password. So I'm going to make one called topher and put in my password and click Create SSH Key. Now, to be clear, this did not create a key, created a key registry on the server. So now this is here. So I'm going to come back here to my site and reload. And you'll see it is there. It is not turned on for this site. It does not work yet. Um, and I would like to note that you can also add a key here and you get the exact same experience as the other place. So if I want to use this key, then I have to turn it on this way and click save. So that means that this key does not yet work for any of my sites. I would need to go to my sites and turn them on. There. Now my key is in place. So now I can click copy right here and paste it in. And there we are. I am logged in. I'm currently in my WordPress docroot. If you simply type cd and hit enter, it will take you to your home directory, which is a little different. Um, the only folder here is files, and that's actually where your files are. However, there are a number of hidden files here like.bashrc,.ssh, etc. You can see there's an authorized key folder there. You could manage that this way. I don't recommend it. Um, you could create a.vimrc if you, you work that way like I do. Um, so let me show you a little trick that I like to do. I like to change my prompt. So I'm going to edit my bashrc, go to the bottom, and you can see I've already put it in here. Um, so I'm going to actually comment that. There. That's the default prompt. It's colored. It's long. It's all one line. I prefer mine— oop. Ah, it put me there. I prefer mine on two lines. So that if I typed in something really long, I get all that space. Now note that this is for this site only. So if you log into different sites, you're going to need to update the.bashrc in those sites as well. Um, one more thing I want to show you is sudo because it's important. Sudo stands for superuser do. And, uh, it allows you to be root basically. So let's take a look at that. I'm going to go to server, let me go to management and sudo users. Now you can see there's a support user that xCloud uses and the one that I created when I uploaded my SSH key. So you can SSH directly in as tophern or whatever user you pick, or you can switch to this user. It is a system user now. So I'm gonna use this username at this IP address, and there we are. Now this user is not root, this user has sudo. So, um, you can see who am— oh, not who is. Who am I? I am topharm. If I do sudo -i, and I can go into interactive sudo, which makes me essentially root. So I type in my password, and there we are. Now, who am I? I am root. And now I am not. And that's how sudo works in SSH. So let's review a little bit. We looked first at the file manager. So we go to a site, we go to Access Data, and that's where we can get into the file manager. Uh, you can turn it off when you're not using it if you wish, or you can leave it on all the time. It doesn't really matter. Um, then we looked at SFTP, and here you can see, uh, FileZilla still connected. And then lastly, we looked at SSH, and you can add keys either in the main team area or right here. And be very sure to remember that you need to activate a key for each and every site. Then You can connect to your server any way you need to and manage your files.
