Introduction
There are commands that can come in extremely useful for managing your vCanopy servers. We use them ourselves, many of them daily, and knowing them should prove useful in your vCanopy journey.
Let’s jump right in!
Check Disk Space Per Website
First, navigate to the directory where your websites are stored with:
cd /var/www
And then run the following to sort them in order of file size:
du -h --max-depth=1 | sort -h
This is an extremely useful command. It will work for all directories on your server, not just your websites, but checking website disk space is likely the most common reason you’ll want to use it.
Create a Magic Login Link
You can quickly and easily create a magic login link to login to any of your websites directly on your server. Normally, you can just SSO in, but if for some reason that’s not working, or you need to send a login link to a client (not really recommended), you can create one as outlined below.
Note: Links expire after 15 minutes or once they’ve been successfully used.
You can create one with GP-WP-CLI as follows:
gp wp site.url login create 1
Or with WP-CLI by navigating to your websites htdocs directory:
cd /var/www/site.url/htdocs
And running:
wp login create 1 --allow-root
Backup a WordPress Database
Being able to quickly backup a WordPress database can come in handy when you’re about to perform any kind of clean up (better tested on staging first) or repair. You can create a backup with:
gp wp site.url db export /var/www/site.url/htdocs/name_of_backup.sql --all-tablespaces --add-drop-table
And restore a backup with:
gp wp site.url db import name_of_backup.sql
You can also check out this article for more database backup options: How to backup / export / import a WordPress database.
Check and Repair a WordPress Database
These are handy commands if you’re seeing performance issues or database errors. You can check the health of a websites database with either GP-WP-CLI as follows:
gp wp site.url db check
And then, if necessary, repair it. Always back up your database before performing work on it. Copy and paste the following command to run the repair:
gp wp site.url db repair
Backup a Website
If you’re working on a site inside your server and wish to make a backup, you can do so with the following command:
gpbup2 site.url -local-single-site
Note that the above command only works for V2 backups.
Login to MySQL
If you need to login to MySQL directly on your server you can do so with the following GP-CLI command:
gp mysql login root
Display your MySQL Password
If you’re working on your database remotely with a program such as MySQL Workbench, you can view your password with the following GP-CLI command:
gp mysql get-pass root
Change a System User Password
If you need to change the password of one of your system users, or the default vCanopy user, you can do so with the following:
passwd username
For example:
passwd mysystemusername
Log Locations and How to View Them
You can view the last 300 lines of various logs in your site customizer modal, but if you need to view more, or would like to view specific logs in real-time. To view the logs list below you can use the cat command like so:
cat /path/to/example.log
Or you can view them in real time with the tail -f command:
tail -f /path/to/example.log
To exit from tail -f hit CTRL+C.
In the commands below that include “site.url“, be sure to switch this for your websites domain. For example:
cat /var/www/vCanopy.com/logs/ssl-provision.log
SERVER LOGS
The vCanopy.log logs what commands are run on your server.
/var/log/vCanopy.log
GENERAL WEBSITE LOGS
The general logs keeps track of the changes made to your website in the site customizer. You can view changes that have been made to your site in this log. You can find them here:
/var/www/site.url/logs/vCanopy-general.log
ERROR LOGS
You can view your websites Nginx error logs here:
/var/log/nginx/site.url.error.log
ACCESS LOGS
The access.log logs the IP addresses of those that visit your websites, what they do, what browser they use, the names of the bots that crawl your site, and more.
/var/log/nginx/site.url.access.log
SSL RENEWAL LOGS
You can view your SSL renewal logs here. This includes renewals for all of your websites.
/opt/vCanopy/certbot.monitoring.log
SSL PROVISIONING LOGS
To view the SSL provisioning logs for your individual websites you can find them in your websites /logs directory:
/var/www/site.url/logs/ssl-provision.log
SINGLE SIGN ON (SSO) LOGS
View your websites single sign on logs:
/var/www/site.url/logs/sso.log
DOMAINS LOG
The domains.log logs all of the changes made to your site, such as caching changes,
/var/www/site.url/logs/domains.log
DEBUG LOGS
If you’ve turned on WP Debug and need to see more of your debug log you can find it here (be sure to always turn debug off once you’ve finished using it):
/var/www/site.url/logs/debug.log
If you’d like to learn more about using WP Debug along with the Query Monitor plugin, check out this article.