Connecting to a Flow via SSH

Using the Secure Shell (SSH) terminal, you can connect to a flow's container to access administrative functionality for the flow.

Launching a Flow’s SSH Terminal

 

1.From the Administrator screen, click the down arrow to the right of the flow you want to access, and select "Open shell". Any changes you make only affect that flow.
2.From the new tab that opens in your web browser, select "Open Terminal". A terminal window opens to the flow's /home/flow directory. You can open multiple terminal windows at a time.

Basic Commands

When you launch a flow’s terminal, Bash runs inside it by default, and you have access to all of the standard Bash commands.

Other basic commands include:

Command

Description

restart-flow

Restarts the flow.

slap <filename>

Opens the specified file in a slap terminal editor, which includes mouse support.

vim <filename>

Opens the specified file in vim, a powerful unix modal text editor.

Directory Structure

The directory structure of each flow can vary, depending on the flow version and what changes have been made to it.

Install the tree command with sudo apt-get install tree, so that you can easily list the contents of your flow directories in a tree structure. After installing it, enter tree to view the directory structure.

Command

Description

/home/flow/ftp

Contains files uploaded by FTP to the flow.

/home/flow/runtime

When a file is saved from a flow without specifying an absolute location, it is saved in this directory.

/home/flow/src

If you use source control to manage changes made to the flow, this is the directory that is tracked.

/home/flow/src/www

If the flow serves a website or forms, this directory contains any static files used for that purpose.

/home/flow/src/flow

Contains the metadata and source files of the flow.