Not long ago I discovered Terminal, SSH, CLI, nano and a host of other fun stuff in the techy world. Watching tutorials and asking questions has me doing some very basic tasks (like install n8n ).
I have even created a workflow with the SSH nodes that executes a few basic CLI commands.
But now I need to go further.
Keeping in mind my very amateur skill level here, how can I use the SSH node (or other nodes if more are needed) to access my VPS, navigate to a folder, open a file with an editor like nano, make a few changes to that file and then save and exit the editor?
For example - if I needed to edit the domain url in file local.php
Got to the directory cd /var/www/memtrk/app/config
nano local.php to edit the file
Edit site url inside that file to new domain but drop the s from http so its just http (The original domain will be consistent so I could use some kind of search and replace function)
I suspect this won’t be possible using nano specifically (as it’s an interactive editor). In scripts but also an n8n workflow you’d typically want to use commands that just do their job and return a result, without requiring additional user input while running.
So you probably want to use sed instead for a job like replacing text in a file. A brief introduction would for example be available here. I’d suggest you get this to work directly via SSH first (maybe not using your production file /var/www/memtrk/app/config/local.php but a copy of the file during development). Once you have your command working the way you want it to, simply copy it over to n8n
).