nick soph's picture

Im trying to connect up to the latest Turnkey Wordpress appliance from MS WebMatrix. WebMatrix only has vanilla FTP support and I have looked but been unable to find instructions for installing FTP on Turnkey Appliances - Can someone point me in the right direction?

 

thanks

nick

Forum: 
Tags: 
nick soph's picture

I followed the instructions below and then added a new user using webmin, with root and ftpuser group membership and used that login to connect to the server.  

Sure that I should have made the user a member of a different group and/or added permissions but not concerned about security in this instance but if anyone can tell us what the right way to grant acccess would be that might help others looking to do similar.

https://wiki.debian.org/Manual-Howto#FTP_Server

Windows 10 64bit with HyperV - learning Javascript slowly

Jeremy Davis's picture

As you discovered TKL is based on Debian (v13.x based on Debian Wheezy/7) so generally any Debian info also applies to TKL (at least the server stuff anyway...).

However, personally I find the Ubuntu docs more detailed and thus more helpful. Strictly speaking Debian and Ubuntu aren't quite the same, but for most purposes they are close enough... As such, I suggest you have a read here. Beyond that you might find some other helpful info via google (here is another random post that came up in google when I was searching for the link to the Ubuntu docs for you).

Jeremy Davis's picture

As per the issue I just put up on the TKL Issue Tracker I suggest that you try adding:

define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');
to
/var/www/wordpress/wp-config.php
Jeremy Davis's picture

But personally I think that adjusting the permissions and WP config to allow internal updating/installing is a better option (as per my post above and/or the bug I just lodged on the TKL Issue Tracker)

Jeremy Davis's picture

Now worries mate. whatever works for you! That's the beauty of open source - there's always multiple ways to achieve your ends! :)

As for you having issues at times, perhaps you are right. If you are using the root account to upload files via SFTP then that may well be your issue. What you could try is resetting the permissions (as per my post) and use your new user to login via SFTP when you want to manually upload stuff to the WordPress folder (and reserve root SFTP login for write access to the rest of the filesystem). I reckon that would stop your issues from recurring...

Also out of interest there appears to be a WordPress setting (that you can add to the wp-config.php file) that allows it to update via SFTP (instead of FTP/FTPS) although I haven't tested it...

Also was a bit rude of me to not thank you for your contribution! It's a great piece of documentation! And regardless of what I think, I'm sure others will appreciate it! :)

Also the beauty of your setup, is that with a little more config (on vsftpd - create a user chroot jail) you could then relatively safely hand over maintenance of the WP site to someone else, while retaining the root/admin access for yourself...

Jeremy Davis's picture

When I tested it, I only changed the permissions on /var/www/wordpress/wp-content and added the line to the wp-config.php and it worked ok for me.

But the way you have set it up seems like it might be much better in the long run, especially if you want someone else to maintain the site (but not the whole server) and/or if you use Filezilla (or similar) to manually work on stuff.

Add new comment