How to grant a Subscription or Domain user SSH or SFTP access to its home directory in Plesk?

Daniel Yordanov

Updated June 24, 2025 18:07

kb: how-to Plesk for Linux

Applicable to:

Plesk for Linux

Question

How to grant SSH or SFTP access to the home directory of Subscriptions under a Service Plan?

Answer

Note: The feature to provide SSH access to a particular directory (for example, /var/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/) is not implemented in Plesk yet. If you would like to see this functionality in Plesk, vote for this feature on Plesk UserVoice. The top-ranked suggestions are likely to be included in the next versions of Plesk.

For a Subscription or Domain

Note: Only the system user of a Subscription or Domain can receive SSH access

Log into Plesk
Go to Domains (or Subscriptions) > example.com > Hosting & DNS > Hosting
Select a user shell Type in the SSH Access field

Note: To learn more about different types of the shells, visit this KB article.
Click OK to apply the changes.

At this point, in order to connect to the Plesk server as a Subscription user via SSH (or SFTP), you should use the Username of the System user and the selected password.

For all Subscriptions under a Service Plan

Log into Plesk
Go to Service Plans > Plan_Name > Hosting Parameters.
Select a user shell in the SSH access to the server shell under the subscription's system user dropdown list.

Note: To learn more about different types of the shells, visit this this KB article.
Additional step: To propagate the new user shell to existing subscriptions, go to Service Plans > plan_name > Default > Permissions tab and set Management of access to the server over SSH to Not Allowed.
Click Update & Sync to apply the changes and synchronize subscriptions with the service plan.

The same thing can be achieved via commands, as shown in the following section:

Click on a section to expand

For all Subscriptions under a Service Plan via CLI commands

You can use the plesk bin service_plan command utility and its -manage_sh_access and -manage_not_chroot_shell options for the purpose, an example is provided below:

1. Log into your server via SSH
2. Afterwards, you can execute one of the following commands (depending on your needs):

To allow the users who subscribe to the Service Plan Plan 1 to access over SSH to the chrooted environment on the server.

# plesk bin service_plan -u "Plan 1" -manage_sh_access true

To allow the users who subscribe to the Service Plan Plan 1 to access over SSH to any shell available on the server:

# plesk bin service_plan -u "Plan 1" -manage_not_chroot_shell true