File Manager
File Manager works on your account's home directory, the same files your websites and applications see, with your own permissions.
Beyond browsing, uploading, and organizing files, it has a few abilities worth knowing before you choose SFTP instead:
- an upload resumes after an interruption
- an archive download needs no space on the server
- a trash lets you recover a deleted file
- web-permission controls decide what the web server can read
The file manager shows hidden files by default, and the Treemap view shows which folders use your space. That's faster than walking the directories when your storage quota fills up.
Upload and download
An upload resumes after an interruption: when the connection drops, it continues from where it stopped rather than starting over, for up to 24 hours.
- One upload can be up to 10 GB.
- Dropping a folder keeps its structure.
- For a file larger than 10 GB, use SFTP.
A download works on anything:
| You download | What happens |
|---|---|
| One file | You get the file as it is. |
| A folder, or several items | You get an archive. The server builds it while sending it, so it needs no space on the server and works whatever your free quota is. |
You choose the format: zip, 7z, or tar; a tar archive can be plain
or compressed with gzip, bzip2, xz, or zstd. The same formats work for
Archive, which creates an archive on the server, and for
Extract Here and Extract to Folder.
Edit a file, and open a terminal
A text file opens in a built-in editor for a quick change, e.g. a
configuration file, an .htaccess, or a small script. For real
development, with several files, search, and extensions, use the
Code Editor.
Some tasks are faster to type than to do with a mouse. The file manager can open a terminal already in the directory you're looking at.
SQLite databases
A SQLite database is one ordinary file, so it's in your files, not on the Databases page. The file manager recognizes one by its contents and offers Open in Adminer, in the context menu and under Actions in the toolbar. It opens the database in a new tab, already signed in.
Adminer writes to the file directly. If an application is using the database at the same time, your writes and its writes can conflict, and changing a schema under a running application is the usual way to break it. Stop the application first, or work on a copy.
See SQLite databases for how the panel recognizes the file and why it needs no password.
The trash
Deleting an item moves it to your account's trash. You can browse the trash from the file manager's tree and restore anything there to its original location.
Nothing empties it automatically, so Empty Trash is the second step whenever you're making space.
There's also a separate permanent delete, with no recovery.
It's a hidden folder in your home directory (.local/share/Trash). An
item already in the trash can't be moved to the trash again, so a delete
inside that folder is permanent, and the file manager asks you to confirm
it first. To restore an item or delete it permanently, open the trash
there.
Web permissions and the web root
Your files are private by default. The web server is a different user, and you must give it access. The Web Permission action controls that grant per file or folder, optionally for everything below a folder.
| Setting | Right for |
|---|---|
| No Permission | Secrets, private data, and application code the server runs but never serves. |
| Read, Execute | The normal setting for what the web server serves: a document root and static assets. |
| Read, Write and Read, Write, Execute | Also let a web application write there, e.g. an upload folder or a cache. |
A missing web permission is the first thing to check.
Two related actions: