Installation of Plesk via Plesk Web Installer fails: Could not connect to the target server. Process exited with status 1

Symptoms

When installing Plesk via Plesk Web Installer (https://get.plesk.com/) using 'root' or a sudo user, initialization fails with the following error message:

PLESK_ERROR: Could not connect to the target server. Process exited with status 1

Cause

SSH configuration of the server does not allow 'root' login or/and password authentication:

• The PermitRootLogin or/and PasswordAuthentication are disabled:

  # cat /etc/ssh/sshd_config | egrep 'PasswordAuthentication|PermitRootLogin' | grep -v "#"
  PermitRootLogin no
  PasswordAuthentication no

• The AllowUsers directive is enabled in the SSH configuration file but does not contain the root user:

  # cat /etc/ssh/sshd_config | grep 'AllowUsers'
  AllowUsers johndoe

Resolution

Enable 'root' user in SSH configuration.