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Magento is the leading e-commerce platform rapidly gaining in popularity. This magento discussion was started by Stuarts 0n March 20 2009

have only just downloaded Magento starting at Version 1.2.1.2 – Looks nice. But I immediately ran into the problem that Magento Connect would not work.

It would keep returning errors about file permissions.

After looking around on here, I pieced together that you needed to change the file permissions to get this to work. But that this had to be done via SSH, and not FTP.

I discovered this for myself. Because I changed all the file permissions to 777 on ftp, but still got the error.

Anyhow, I have just figured out how to do this with SSH, and its really quite easy. However, for the technically challenged I have set out a step by step process of EXACTLY what you need to do. As frankly, this would have saved me a lot of time figuring it all out if it had been here to begin with, and someone else will undoubtedly benefit from the knowledge.

I am definitely not claiming to be an expert on this stuff, so don’t ask me questions. This is simply what I did. Its not rocket science though, and I do think that these things are often made to seem harder then they really are (hence the post)

Here you go.

Exactly how to SSH into a server and change the file permissions to get Magento Connect working:

How To Login Using SSH and Change File Permissions

1/ Go to: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/ – And download Putty to your desktop.

(At the time of asking the download link is:)

http://the.earth.li/~sgtatham/putty/latest/x86/putty.exe

2/ Open the PuTTY client (usually putty.exe). You will now see the “PuTTY Configuration” window.

3/ On the left side, you will see a tree structure called “Category:”. There are four categories: Session, Terminal, Window, and Connection. Expand the “Connection” category and select “SSH”.

4/ On the right side, look in the middle:
for “Preferred SSH protocol version:”. Select version “2”.

5/ On the left side in the category tree structure, go back to “Session”.

6/ On the right side, look for the “Host Name (or IP Address)” input box at the top. Enter your server’s main IP address only.

eg 66.12.12.15 – Whatever. Ask your host if you don’t know what it is. Odds are that it will appear somewhere on you welcome email from them, or else if you have cpanel then you will be able to see it on their.

7/ Click ‘Open’ and a window appears.

8/ Click on the little empty green box with your left mouse. It will then fill with green and you will be able to type (This applies all the time)

9/ Login as: (Put in the username you would login as on your server)

10/ Then root@66.12.12.15 Password: (ie the 66.12.12.15 will be whatever IP address you put in) – Put in the password for your server here

11/ Ok. You are now logged into the ‘root’ of your server. That means the very bottom layer. So you will want to change directories in order to run some commands to change file permissions:

So…

12/ In my server I had to type cd /home/mysite/public_html

Note – My magento install was setup in the root of the domain.

If I had set it up in a folder called ‘magento’ (as lots of folk seem to here) then I would have instead typed:

cd /home/mysite/public_html/magento

Tip: If you haven’t got a scoobies what to put here then you can do two things to find out.

- Type the command ‘ls’ at the prompt will list the folders. So you can see what is available.

- Try ftping into your site. If you look at the box at the top it shows you what you need to type ie just go into the folder whose permissions you want to change in ftp and copy the url bar

13/ Now comes the ‘magic’ that will get Magento Connect working grin

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