Xgineer Solutions, Inc

Web Shell

Web development can be often be frustrating depending on the tools your given. This is especially true when dealing with a shared server environment as one does not normally have any access to a shell of any kind. All that is typically available is FTP and a web server. This can make installing/maintaining software on a shared server (ie. Symfony framework) quite difficult, since it is often easier to just run a simple command directly on the server. Hence, the need for a web shell.

A web shell is a utility that gives you the ability to run commands, like tar and mkdir, directly on a remote machine via a web server and HTTP messages. Of course, this tool would not replace something like SSH. When SSH is not an option though, having a web shell can make life a lot easier. For instance, it’s much faster to compress a large folder into an archive, upload that single file to the server via FTP, and then extract it on the server, rather than uploading the whole folder over FTP since FTP sends each file one by one.

Now, there are certainly a few other web shells out there, but none of them have the ability to allow the commands to read from Standard Input. Also, the commands have to wait until it finishes to completely get the output. The tool we made provides such abilities, plus it has command completion. It also has a directory browser in which you can download, upload, and edit files in folder on the server merely for convenience.

Our web shell is built on PHP and should work on any Linux server, plus we’re releasing it as open source. Due to the nature of a web shell, it still has a few limitations, like you can’t execute certain commands like ssh, but we find it more than useful regardless of such limitations.

The current state of the web shell is beta, so they may be bugs. We certainly welcome feedback on bugs or any improvements.

For see a complete list of features and limitations, http://red.xgineer.com/wiki/webshell/Web_Shell

Download it from here: http://red.xgineer.com/wiki/webshell/Download

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