Basic Plesk operation failed: Error: no secure shell available

Symptoms

An attempt to perform one of the following operations in Plesk:

• Create a subscription
• Change the FTP account password
• Deploy an application (e.g., WordPress)
• Settings Permanent SEO-safe 301 redirect from HTTP to HTTPS at Plesk > Domains > example.com > Hosting settings

the operation fails with the following error:

PLESK_ERROR: Error: no secure shell available

Cause

There are at least two possible causes:

1. In the set of permissions, Plesk has the following option: Setup of potentially insecure web scripting options that override provider's policy. This permission can be enabled or disabled per reseller, per service plan, and per subscription. If the option is unchecked (which is the default) and you are logged in under a non-administrative account, basic Plesk functionality will become unavailable:

   • Create a subscription
   • Change the FTP account password
   • Deploy an application

2. There is also an option called Management of access to the server over SSH, which is set to Not allowed by default. If you set it to a different value when creating a subscription, the creation may fail due to insufficient permissions for the user to perform that operation.

Resolution

1. Check if the Setup of potentially insecure web scripting options that override provider's policy option is selected/enabled.

2. If the first solution did not help, try to set the Management of access to the server over SSH option to Not allowed .

   In this example, the above settings are applied to a subscription at Plesk > Subscriptions > example.com > Customize:

   

3. If the previous steps did not solve the problem, create database backup and run the bootstrapper repair procedure:

   # MYSQL_PWD=`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` mysqldump -uadmin psa > /root/psa.`date +%F_%H.%M`.sql
   # /usr/local/psa/bootstrapper/pp11.5.30-bootstrapper/bootstrapper.sh repair

   OR
   
   Run Plesk installer utility:

   # /usr/local/psa/admin/bin/autoinstaller