Whole server access recommendations for web developer

[rockethouse]

Hi Guys,

I have a cPanel / WHM / CloudLinux server setup for all my clients (hosting around 20-30 websites mostly Wordpress based).

Since I am a single developer I don't use or need GIT / SVN so I currently do all of my developing / editing via FTP logging into each account separately and making changes etc..

I know this isn't secure and I wan't to change my methods, also i've been getting lots of brute force attacks as of late so I want to close FTP altogether.

Since i'm constantly working on several sites / accounts i'm always logging in and out of each account manually and it gets frustrating!

My ideal setup would be to be able to login to the whole server and then have access to each and every cpanel account from there... but doing this without using "root" since I will be editing / uploading files etc..

SFTP / SSH seems like the best method for now, but Im having trouble setting it up.

Can anyone recommend a safe and secure solution that is also easy to use (ie having access to all the files in one connection).

Im using OSX as well.

Cheers!

 

[rhenderson]

We use CoreFTP for SSH/SFTP using a custom SSH port, then you could turn off FTP but you still have to login as each user to keep your permissions straight. This would at least help with your brute force attempts.

You can login as root this way (if your SSH configuration allows it) but if you edited different users files the ownership would be wrong/reset as root.

You might be able to use expandrive and setup multiple local folders to sync with and have expandrive login to each account as the account owner, then when you change the files locally they would propagate properly to the server with the correct ownership. I played around with doing something similar in the past and it worked pretty much like you are wanting, it's only $40; we just did not use it enough to buy the software. We have not tried the newest version - They do have a mac version

 

[cPanelMichael]

Hello

Have you considered using SSH as "root"? You could then "su" to individual account usernames when making changes to files owned by those accounts. Otherwise, SFTP might be a better option if you want to use a client such as FileZilla to login as the account username and upload files.

Thank you.