Pantheon

WinSCP on Pantheon

WinSCP is a popular free SFTP and FTP client for Windows, a powerful file manager that allows you to upload and download files on the Pantheon server. It provides a user-friendly interface for copying files between a local and remote computer using the FTP or SFTP protocol. This software is available only on Microsoft Windows.

Main Features

All common operations with files
Graphical Interface
Integrated text editor
Scripting and task automation
Translated into many languages

A complete WinSCP guide and an active user forum are freely accessible at the WinSCP site.

Download WinSCP

If you don’t already have WinSCP installed on your computer, download the most recent update and install it from their website.

Open WinSCP

Open WinSCP by accessing the application on the Windows Start menu. Make sure you have your site’s Pantheon SFTP connection information on hand. See the guidelines on how to find the SFTP credentials for your site if you need to get the connection details.

Enter the details from the Site Dashboard Connection Info from Pantheon. Use the password that is being used when logging into the Pantheon User Dashboard. Do check the protocol must be in SFTP and the port number is 2222.

Alternatively, you can also have passwordless access by using an SSH private key. Pantheon doesn’t offer SSH access to a shell environment but it allows it to be used on SFTP protocol.

You should add your public SSH key into your Pantheon account to get the most out of it. SSH keys are a better option for authentication than a basic password since they provide additional security protection. No matter how many sites you work on, you will only need to do this once. See Generate and Add SSH Keys for further information.

Click the Advanced select button, under SSH then click Authentication. Enter a private key in PPK format.

To get the site’s root simply navigate to the code folder and you will be able to download and upload files as normal.

December 7, 2021 by Carey Pantheon 0

Protecting WordPress login page thru Basic Authentication

Take steps to avoid brute force attacks on the WordPress admin dashboard page. This would add an additional layer to site security and avoid traffic excess. Basic Authentication would facilitate HTTP requests to require a username and a password.

Add Basic Authentication via .htaccess

This is applicable to sites using Apache as the web server, this would not work on hosts with Nginx as their web server. Two simple steps:

Create a .htpasswd file then upload it to your webroot folder, this is the folder mostly where “.htaccess" resides.

Add this line to your .htaccess file

<Files wp-login.php>
AuthUserFile /.htpasswd
AuthName "Security Lock"
AuthType Basic
require valid-user
</Files>

Add Basic Authentication on the wp-config.php file

Sometimes as customers don’t have access to server configuration and PHP would be the fallback method.

if(preg_match('/(wp-login.php)/',$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'])){
    if (!isset($_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER']) || ( $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'] != 'yourusername' && $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW']   != 'yourpassword')) {
	    header( 'Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate, max-age=0' );
	    header( 'WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="Security Lock"' );
        header( 'HTTP/1.0 401 Unauthorized' );          
        exit();          
     }
}

December 6, 2021 by Carey Pantheon Wordpress 0

Skipping WordPress Background Updates

What is Site Health?

The WordPress admin interface is designed to assist end-users in self-servicing their sites by addressing typical setup difficulties and other aspects of maintaining a healthy online presence. It also gives developers a consistent place to store debugging information.

Why the need to skip background updates?

Some hosts, specially Pantheon.io handle the core updates by means of applying upstream updates, or in some common practice, more sites are now in version control using git. Site owners don’t want to ignore the whole time and miss out on potential problems.

Code snippet to skip the update

Create a file named sitehealth.php put it in wp-content/mu-plugins and put these lines of code.

<?php
/**
 * Plugin Name: Sitehealth 
 * Plugin URI: https://github.com/careydayrit/
 * Description: Skip core update on sites using Git
 * Version: 0.1
 * Author: Carey Dayrit
 * Author URI: https://careydayrit.com/
 *
 * @package sitehealth
 */
 
add_filter('site_status_tests', 'skip_background_updates_tests', 10, 1 );


function skip_background_updates_tests($tests){
    unset($tests['async']['background_updates']);
    return $tests;
}

December 5, 2021 by Carey Pantheon Wordpress 0

Team Management through Pantheon Terminus

Required Reading: https://pantheon.io/docs/terminus

What is Terminus?

The Terminus command-line interface provides advanced interaction with Pantheon. Terminus enables you to do almost everything in a terminal that you can do in the Dashboard, and much more. This article listed several commands in Terminus 2 that can be used in managing a site’s team using Terminus. First thing first, in all terminus commands we should know how to identify a site to manage it properly.

Getting the Site ID

The site id is an identifier of the site used to route and used by the Pantheon platform to identify the site’s dashboard. To get the site_id you need to login into Pantheon and pick the correct site, to be on the dashboard.

Getting the Site Name

The site name is a machine name, which is a readable name used also to identify a site in Pantheon. The site name is used mostly with the platform URL.

List all team members

terminus site:team:list

Displays the list of team members for a site.

site:team:list [–format FORMAT] [–fields FIELDS] [–field FIELD] [–] <site_id> or <site_name>

The command accepts the <site_name> or the <site_id> of the Pantheon site.

The arguments –field and –fields are mostly the same, the difference is the field is just a single field while fields are a group of fields separated by comma(,).

email: Email
role: Role
id: User ID
is_owner: Is owner?

The available formats are, without the –format option the default is a table.

csv
json
list,
null
php,
print-r
sections
string
table
tsv
var_export
xml
yaml

Add a member

terminus site:team:add

Add a user to the site’s team list.

site:team:add <site_id/site_name> <member> <role>

The member argument should be an email if the email is not associated with a Pantheon account, an invite will be sent.

The role has two choices

developer
team_member

Change member role

terminus site:team:role

Update a member role on the site’s team.

site:team:role <site_id/site_name> <member> <role>

This command has the same arguments as the add member command but this would only change the role of a user on the site’s team.

Remove a member

terminus site:team:remove

site:team:remove <site_id/site_name> <member>

Removes a member from the site’s team

December 5, 2021 by Carey Pantheon Terminus 0

Filezilla on Pantheon

FileZilla is an FTP client that allows you to upload and import files to and from the Pantheon server. This app allows you to copy several files at the same time. It is a cross-platform software that is available on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux.

This article will walk you through the steps of downloading and uploading your WordPress or Drupal site on Pantheon.

Download Filezilla

If you don’t already have FileZilla installed, grab the most recent update and install it on your computer.

Start Filezilla

Start FileZilla by looking for the application on the start menu or search bar on Windows, on the applications folder on Mac OS, and search for Ubuntu. Keep in mind that Pantheon uses a non-standard port for SFTP, and the protocol must be SFTP rather than FTP.

Create a New Site

Click the Site Manager Icon, that would be the Icon under the File menu.

This would prompt the Site Manager window that would allow a new connection to be made on Filezilla.

Click the New Site button and put details from the Site Dashboard Connection Info from Pantheon. Use the password that is being used on Pantheon User Dashboard. Make sure the Protocol is in SFTP and is using port 2222.

Select to accept the server’s host key for the current session so it is stored in the cache. This will allow you to connect to the server and manage your files for the current session.

To get to the site’s root simply navigate to the code folder and you will be able to continue managing your files as normal.

June 6, 2021 by Carey Pantheon Wordpress 0