File Manager
Every WordPress site on RunxBuild has a file manager in the dashboard. It reaches the same files SFTP would, without a client, a key, or a separate credential to manage. Open the site and select the Files tab.
The view starts at your site root. The breadcrumb across the top shows where you are and each segment is clickable, so you can jump back several levels at once rather than stepping up one directory at a time.
Editing a file
Select any text file to open it in the editor, make your change, and choose
Save. This is the fast path for the edits that usually justify an SFTP
session — a line in wp-config.php, a rule in .htaccess, a snippet in a
theme’s functions.php.
Recognised text types include php, js, jsx, ts, css, scss, html,
json, xml, yml, yaml, ini, conf, htaccess, env, sh, sql,
log, md, txt, twig, po, and pot.
Two behaviours surprise people, and both are deliberate:
- A binary file downloads instead of opening. Images, archives and fonts have nothing useful to show in a text editor, so selecting one starts a download.
- A very large text file downloads instead of opening. Loading a multi-megabyte log into a browser editor is slow and rarely what you wanted, so it downloads and you can open it locally.
In both cases the dashboard tells you what it did rather than failing silently.
Uploading
Upload takes one or more files into the directory you are currently viewing.
Upload a .zip and extract it here uploads an archive and unpacks it in place. This is the one to use for a theme or plugin you have built yourself — it is a single upload rather than several hundred small ones, and it is dramatically faster than the equivalent over SFTP.
Downloading
Select a single file to download it directly. Select several items and download
them together as a .zip — useful for pulling a whole theme directory down for
local work, or taking a copy of wp-content/uploads before a risky change.
Folders, renaming and deleting
New folder creates a directory in the current location.
Rename works on files and folders alike.
Delete accepts a multi-select, so you can clear several items in one action. Deletion is immediate and there is no recycle bin — take a download of anything you are unsure about first.
When to use something else
The file manager is built for targeted edits and one-off transfers. It is not a deployment mechanism.
If you are changing theme or plugin code that you maintain, keep it in a repository and deploy from GitHub, so you get a build record, a history of what changed, and a way back. Hand-editing production files is convenient exactly once, and then it is the reason nobody can tell what version is live.
For database changes, use the database browser rather than editing SQL dumps by hand.