Hi, there. This is Lawrence Simon, a technical writer on the documentation
team at cPanel - the hosting platform of choice. I'm here to show you how to use
the File Manager interface to manage your website's files. You can also use
our FTP, SFTP, and Web Disk features if you prefer other methods of file
management, but the star of this show is file manager. One important note, you'll
hear me refer to directories and folders. For the purposes of this video, those two
terms represent the same thing. Let's go ahead and log in to cPanel. Here we are in
the cPanel home interface. Let's scroll down to the file group, and then click
File Manager. The File Manager interface will open in a new browser tab. The
search feature allows you to search for files. Select the location that you want
to search. Enter what you're looking for and click go. A list of the files that
match your search criteria will appear. Double-click any item to navigate to a
directory or the directory that contains that file. I'll go ahead and close this
list. To manage your preferences for the file manager interface, click settings in
the top right corner. A new window will appear. You can use these settings to
determine the directory that File Manager opens in, whether you want to
view hidden files, and whether you want cPanel to display a character encoding
warning every time that you open a text file. Make your changes and click Save or
if you don't want to make any changes, click Cancel.
This list of files and folders on the left side of the interface is called a
directory tree. Click a plus icon to expand that directory and view its
contents, and click the folder or name to open that directory. The contents of the
current directory appear here in the main window. This window lists all the
files in the directory, their sizes, when they were last modified, their file types,
and permissions. Navigating through your files in file manager is pretty similar
to navigating your files on your desktop or laptop computer. To open a directory
in this window, double-click it. I'll double click the 'public_HTML' directory
to open it. In most cases, that's where you put your files for your website. Then
I'll double-click 'folder_one', and the window displays its contents. If you want
to go back up a level on the directory tree, click 'Up One Level'. To go back to
the home directory, click 'Home'. You can also click 'Back' and 'Forward' to navigate
this window. Okay, let's go back to the public_HTML directory. If you need to
reload the contents of a directory, click 'Reload'. Now I'm going to show you how to
select files. Click 'Select All' to select all the items in a directory. You can
click 'Unselect All' to unselect them. You can also click an item to select it, or a
shift-click to select multiple items. To sort the windows contents by a column,
click that columns heading. The toolbar at the top of the interface includes
many actions that you can perform on your files and folders. Click 'Plus File'
to create a new file. I'll call this file 'test.HTML', and click create new file,
and the list of files and folders refreshes to show the new file that I
created. Click 'Plus Folder' to create a new folder. I'll call this folder 'folder_four' and click create new folder and the list of files and folders refreshes to
show the new folder that I created. Click 'Copy' to copy the selected file. I'll copy
this file to 'folder_four.' Click 'Move' to move a file into another folder. I'll move
this file to 'folder_three.' Let's look in those folders, and there is a 'test.HTML'
file, and there it is again. Okay, let's go back to the 'public.HTML' folder. Click
'Upload' to upload files to the current folder. A new window will appear. I'll
upload 'test3.HTML' and when we go back to the file manager interface and
reload it, there it is 'test3.HTML' and if you want to download a file, select it
and click download. Click 'Delete' to delete selected files. They'll go to your
trash folder. Well, unless you select this option to skip the trash folder and
permanently delete the file. Let's not select it.
And we deleted the file. You can click 'View Trash' to see what's in the trash
folder. To restore a file, right click it and click 'Restore', then click 'Restore
File' in this warning box, and the system will restore the deleted file to its
previous location. You can also click 'Empty Trash.' To empty the trash folder
permanently, click 'Empty Trash' in the warning box. The window refreshes back to
the home directory. Let's go back to the 'public_HTML' folder. Click 'Rename' to
rename files or folders. Let's change the name of 'test3.HTML' to 'test4.HTML.' When you want to edit files, you have two options. Click 'Edit' to edit
files in a plain text editor or click 'HTML editor' to edit HTML files in an
HTML editor. You can click permissions to update a file or directories permissions.
I'll change this file to 'Full Permissions' and save them. Want to look
at a file? Select the file and click 'View' and you can use extract to extract zip
files or select a bunch of files and compress
them. To compress those files into a zip file, you can perform many of these
actions by right clicking on a file in the list like this. There are several
more options available when you right-click a directory. Click -
'password-protect' to manage password protection on that folder. Click 'leach
protect' to monitor and manage the use of the password protection feature. If
someone gives out credentials for a user, you can get alerts and automatically
disable those credentials. Click 'manage indices' to manage how the web server
presents an index of files to visitors. Check out our other videos and
documentation for more information about these features.
For more information about cPanel, visit cPanel.net or follow cPanel on twitter.
Let us know if this video was helpful. Leave a comment, and you can subscribe to
our YouTube channel for the latest videos about cPanel and WHM. This has
been Laurence Simon. Thank you for watching, and please stay safe out there.