When would you use Terminal / SSH for web development?

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1

I am trying Coda on Mac out right now and I was wondering why I would ever use it.

2

Hi

I use SSH for the following:

  1. I have a command line script that recursively adjusts folder permissions and file permissions across an entire site - very tricky to do without SSH access.
    In 2 seconds, all my folders are 755 and all my files are 644.

  2. wget. Let’s say I need to install a big script. The usual way is to download the zip file from the developer site. Then upload it to my own site. Then unzip it in cpanel.

With wget I can fetch it directly from the developer site to my server without the download –> upload process.

  1. Installing server apps. I have a VPS so I login via SSH as the root user, and am then able to install server-level scripts for additional troubleshooting, server maintenance etc.

Regards
Brendon

3

Short answer: mass operations.

Long answer: you can issue a single command in the shell and affect thousands of files very quickly. You can change ownership/permissions, copy/move/delete groups of files and whole directories, create archives to download to your computer whole sites as single files, etc.

If you would do this over FTP, you would have to wait until your FTP client performs the operation on EVERY file.

4

Sometimes when you are unable to delete files via ftp then in such case running command via ssh shell becomes handy.

Additionally i would like to know:
Which ssh client do you use?

5

Thanks, sounds like some good features.

I am using OS X’s Terminal inside Coda.