Terminal and SSH

What this page is for: run commands on your server from the panel itself — as root, or as one project's own account — and decide who may sign in over SSH: a project's or website's own account with a key, and SSH for the whole server on or off.

Open Server and the Terminal tab for a shell as root, the terminals open right now, and SSH for the whole server. A 6amMart project's terminal is under Advanced → Terminal; a website's is its Terminal page. Both carry that project's SSH access below the terminal.

You need

• The owner's login. A temporary login and the read-only demo cannot open a terminal or see or change SSH access, and neither can Tia, the panel's assistant.
• To confirm it is you — the 6-digit code from your authenticator app, or your panel password when two-factor login is off — to open a root terminal, to add an SSH key, to turn on SSH access that already has keys, and to turn SSH back on for the server. You are asked once; for the next 5 minutes the panel does not ask again. Security → Confirming it is you sets how long (every time, 2, 5 or 15 minutes) — see Security.

The rule that does not move: what you type is never recorded. The Activity page shows that a terminal opened — who, as which account, from which address — and when and why it closed. Nothing in between.

Open a terminal

Press Open terminal. A dark terminal opens on the page, sized to it; drag the window and it follows. Everything works as in any terminal: colours, full-screen programs such as top, nano or vim, and Tab completion. Select text to copy it; paste with Ctrl+V (⌘V on a Mac). Ctrl+C stops the running command, as it always does.

The line under the title says which account the shell runs as and in which folder:

• Server → Terminal — root, in /root. Root can change anything on the server, which is why the panel asks you to confirm it is you first.
• A 6amMart project — the project's own account (six-<name>), in its app folder (/var/www/<name>/admin). Files you create belong to the project, exactly as after a deploy, so php artisan, composer and git behave as the panel's own deploys do.
• A website — the website's own account (site-<name>), in its folder, with the website's own PHP and Node.js versions first on the path.

The project and website accounts keep their shell history and tool caches in their own home under /var/cache/sixpanel, never in the app folder — so a terminal never leaves files behind that would stop the next deploy.

When it closes

A terminal closes:

• after 15 minutes without typing — a minute before, the page warns you, and any key keeps it open. Output does not count: a log scrolling in a forgotten tab is not somebody at the keyboard;
• when you leave the page or close the tab;
• when you sign out, or your sign-in ends;
• when the panel restarts — an update restarts it — and the terminal says so;
• when its website is moved to another server — the move closes the terminals open on it as it pauses the website, and says so;
• when you type exit.

Closing works like a dropped SSH connection: the running command gets the hang-up signal and stops. To keep something running after you close the terminal, start it the way you would over SSH — nohup <command> &, or inside tmux or screen. The page says why each terminal closed, and Open again starts a new one.

Open terminals

At most three terminals can be open on the server at once. Server → Terminal lists them — where each one is, the account, the address it was opened from, when, and how long it has been idle. Close ends that terminal's shell at once — the way to free a place when a terminal was left open in another browser.

SSH access for a project or website

Off until you turn it on. On, it lets that project's own account sign in over SSH with a key, never a password — for deploying from your computer with rsync or scp, or an editor that saves over SFTP. Turning it on for one project gives nothing to any other project, to root, or to your server's own login user.

Off means off. While access is off, the account cannot sign in over SSH at all — not with a password, and not with a key file placed inside the project's own folder. The only keys that ever count are the ones listed on this card, which SixPanel keeps outside the app folder where the app cannot change them.

Add a key

Paste the line from your public key file into Add a public key and press Add key — for example the contents of ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub. It starts with ssh-ed25519, ssh-rsa or ecdsa-sha2-…. No key yet? Make one on your own computer:

ssh-keygen -t ed25519
cat ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub

Ed25519 keys are the best choice. RSA keys must be 2048 bits or more, and DSA keys are refused (OpenSSH no longer accepts them). If you paste a private key by mistake, the panel refuses it and says so — never paste a private key anywhere. You can paste several keys at once, one per line; up to 20 per account.

Each key is listed with its type, its fingerprint and the note at the end of the line (often your name and computer). Remove takes a key off at once.

Sign in

With access on and at least one key, the card shows the exact line to use, with Copy:

ssh six-myshop@203.0.113.10 -p 22

It uses the server's own address, not the panel's domain: a domain behind Cloudflare carries web traffic only, never SSH.

You land in the app folder, as the project's account. Port, agent and X11 forwarding are off for these accounts, so a tool that tunnels through SSH — VS Code's Remote-SSH, for one — cannot connect this way; SFTP, scp and rsync work.

Turn SSH access off

Turn SSH access off stops every key at once, takes the account's login shell away again and closes the account to SSH altogether. The keys stay on the list, so turning access back on brings them back.

While a website is being moved

A website that is being moved to another server (Move projects to another server) takes no SSH sign-in and no terminal from the moment the move pauses it. Its card says Closed for the move, its keys stop working, and a session that was open is ended — the move's log names what it ended. A copy is only worth comparing if nothing can write to it.

The keys stay on the list. Access opens again by itself, exactly as it was, when a move ends without moving the website. On the copy a move leaves behind it stays closed for as long as that copy is parked, and opens again when you press Start it here again on its Overview. Turning access off and removing a key work at any time.

SSH access is not sent to the other server. Who may sign in there is your decision there, behind your password: turn it on again on the website's Terminal page on that server, and add the keys you want. The same holds for a 6amMart project that is moved.

An agent on the server, inside one project

*In the panel this is the card Let an agent work on the server itself, on the project's AI agent page.*

You can hand one project to an AI agent that works in a shell — Claude Code, Codex or any other — without handing it the server. The agent works as the project's own account: it reaches that project's code, database, deploys and logs, and nothing else on the server. A staging site is a project of its own, with its own account and its own AI agent page.

There are two ways to give an agent one project, both on that page:

• From your own computer — the first card, Connect your AI agent to …. Nothing runs on the server; see Connect your own agent.
• On the server itself — this section. The agent runs in a shell on the server and edits the files in place.

Open the project's AI agent page and press Turn it on on the card Let an agent work on the server itself. The panel asks you to confirm it is you, then prepares three things for that account:

• A shell that is ready. The project's own PHP and Node.js come first, npm i -g works without root (what it installs goes into the account's own home), and the shell opens in the code.
• A guide the agent reads by itself. The panel writes it into the account's home as ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md, ~/.codex/AGENTS.md and ~/AGENTS.md, and rewrites it when the project changes. It says what the project is, its folders and addresses, its PHP and Node.js versions, its database and where its credentials are, whether this is production or a staging site (and of what, on which branch), the rules, and the commands below. Read the guide the agent is given on the card shows the text. Claude Code is also told to refuse the commands that wipe a database (migrate:fresh, db:wipe and the like).
• The sixpanel command, for this project only. See the list below.

The card then shows three steps:

1. Sign in as the account — in the project's Terminal, or over SSH with the line the card shows once SSH access is on and has your key (the card links to the Terminal page, where SSH access is).
2. Start your agent there — for Claude Code:

   claude

Not installed in that account yet? npm install -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code first.

3. It reads its guide by itself, and has the sixpanel command for this project. There is nothing to add or connect: no claude mcp add line is needed on the server.

The sixpanel command also answers a session of AI Coding that the panel itself is running for that project — with this switch on or off: you started that session in the panel.

What the account may run

sixpanel status                  what this project is, whether it is live, recent errors
sixpanel logs [what] [-n N]      recent log lines (sixpanel logs help names them)
sixpanel deploy                  put the repository's code live: pull, build, migrations
sixpanel restart [what]          restart a service of this project
sixpanel jobs                    the panel's recent jobs for this project
sixpanel job <id>                one job: its steps, its error, its last lines
sixpanel changes                 a staging site on a branch: what changed on the server
sixpanel commit -m "<message>"   a staging site on a branch: commit it and push it
sixpanel sync                    a staging site on a branch: bring production's commits in
sixpanel mcp                     the same tools as an MCP server, for the agent itself

Every one of them acts on this project only — the account cannot name another — and every change one of them makes is on the Activity page, marked with the account's name (a command that only reads — status, logs, jobs, changes — leaves no line). The account holds no password for your repository: deploy, commit and sync have the panel do that part. Any other sixpanel command answers that it is for the server's administrator.

A change that cannot be taken back still waits for you. Promoting a staging site to production, deleting, restoring a backup: the agent's command waits, the panel shows you an approval card under AI, and nothing happens until you approve it.

The sixpanel command is part of SixPanel Pro, like Connect your own agent — it is the same thing for one project. The shell, the guide and SSH access are part of every plan.

What it cannot do

• Reach another project, the server's settings, or root. There is no sudo.
• Be used by the project's own website. The website runs as the same account, so the panel looks at where a call comes from: it answers a person or an agent in an SSH session or in the panel's Terminal, and refuses the web app, its workers and its scheduled tasks. A fault in the website is not a way into the panel.
• Go on after you close the way in. Turning SSH access off stops the command for sessions that are still open; a project that is being moved answers nothing until the move ends.

In a 6amMart project

The agent's own files — CLAUDE.md, AGENTS.md, .claude/, .codex/, .cursor/, .mcp.json — are kept out of git inside the project's code, so a deploy does not stop over them and does not delete them. Any other file the agent changes and does not commit still stops the next deploy, as it would for you: that is what sixpanel commit on a staging site is for.

The guide tells the agent the rules of a 6amMart project: never artisan config:cache or optimize by hand (the panel decides that per shop), sixpanel restart php after a PHP file changes, and no destructive database command on production.

Turn it off

Turn it off on the card stops the sixpanel command for that account at once and takes the guide and the shell set-up out of its home. Files the agent made in the code stay. In a 6amMart project the account's home folder counts as a build cache again once the switch is off, so the build-cache clean-up on the Disk page (and a deploy, when the caches are over their limit) may empty it — the agent's sign-in and the tools installed with npm i -g go with it. SSH access is its own switch and is not changed.

Like SSH access, this is never sent to another server by a move: on the server a project was moved to, you prepare its account again there.

Turn SSH off for the whole server

Server → Terminal shows whether SSH is on and on which port. Turn SSH off stops the SSH server: nobody — you included — can sign in over SSH until it is turned back on. SSH sessions open at that moment are not cut off.

With SSH off, the panel's own Terminal and your hosting provider's console (the "Console" or "Recovery" button in their dashboard) are the way in. That is why the panel only lets you turn SSH off once it answers on its own domain with a certificate (Security → Access → Panel address): a panel reached only through a bare IP address could be one address change away from no way in at all.

Turn SSH on starts it again exactly as it was before (on Ubuntu the socket that starts SSH on the first connection, on Debian the SSH service).

What a temporary login can do

Nothing here. A temporary login cannot open a terminal, cannot see the list of open terminals, and cannot see or change SSH access or SSH itself — the panel refuses each of those and says why.

How to check it worked

• Terminal — after Open terminal, run whoami and pwd: they print the account and the folder the line under the title names.
• SSH access — from your own computer, the line the card shows signs you in without asking for a password. Then whoami prints the project's account.
• SSH off — ssh to the server from your computer is refused (connection refused or timed out), and the Terminal tab still opens a shell.
• Activity shows a line for each terminal opened and closed, and for each SSH change.
• An agent on the server — signed in as the account, sixpanel status prints the project, and cat ~/AGENTS.md prints the guide. The same command typed by any other user says it must run as root.

If it went wrong

• "A terminal cannot open on this server yet: python3 is not installed". The terminal runs its shell through python3. Install it from your provider's console or over SSH: sudo apt-get install -y python3-minimal. The next panel update installs it by itself too.
• The terminal says the connection was lost straight after opening. Something between your browser and the panel is blocking WebSockets — a company proxy or a firewall in front of the server. Cloudflare passes them through. Try from another network.
• "3 terminals are already open". Close one under Open terminals on Server → Terminal, or wait for an idle one to close.
• The card says "Closed for the move", or "… is being moved to another server right now". The website is being moved, or this is the copy that was moved away. See While a website is being moved above: wait for the move, or press Start it here again on the website's Overview to use this copy.
• The card "Let an agent work on the server itself" says the panel is not answering the sixpanel command in this account. The switch is on, but the small helper the panel runs to answer that command is not running. The panel starts it with itself and starts it again by itself within half a minute when it stops; if the line stays, restart the panel — sudo sixpanel panel restart over SSH — and open the card again. The helper needs python3, as the terminal does (see the first line of this list). Right after an update to 1.5.3 the line can show until the panel has restarted: the restart is what finishes it.
• sixpanel says "sixpanel is not switched on for …". Press Turn it on on the card Let an agent work on the server itself, on the project's AI agent page.
• sixpanel says it answers "only from an SSH session or the panel's Terminal". The command was started by something other than a sign-in — a scheduled task, the website itself, or su from another user. Run it in an SSH session as the account, or in the panel's Terminal.
• sixpanel says SSH access is off. A session that was open when SSH access was turned off is no longer answered. Turn SSH access on again, or use the Terminal.
• The card says something was "Not written yet". The line under the title says why — most often a link stands where a folder should be in the account's home (~/.claude, for one). The panel never writes through a link there. Remove it and switch the card off and on again.
• The key is refused when you sign in. Check the server's SSH is on, the card says access is On, and the key on your computer is the one listed (compare ssh-keygen -lf ~/.ssh/id_ed25519.pub with the fingerprint on the card). If your own SSH settings name the account in a Match block of their own, or no longer read /etc/ssh/sshd_config.d/, the panel refuses to turn access on and says which.
• "The SSH server refused the new settings". The panel checks every change with sshd -t before it counts, and put the previous settings back. The message quotes what SSH did not accept — usually a hand edit elsewhere in /etc/ssh/ — fix that first.
• Locked out with SSH off. Open the panel and use Server → Terminal, or your provider's console, and turn SSH on again (sudo systemctl enable --now ssh on Debian, sudo systemctl enable --now ssh.socket on Ubuntu).