Quick Wordpress plugin installation with ssh and wget

Have you ever wanted an easier way to install Wordpress themes and pugins? If you have ssh access to your website you can install them directly on the sever with a few simple commands. No more downloading to your computer, extracting the zip file, and uploading again. This also works really well with Drupal Modules or any other script you need to download from another site.

(Unfortunately, most shared hosting accounts don’t have ssh access, but hopefully this will be useful for anyone on virtual hosts or dedicated servers who don’t already know how to do this!)

1. SSH into your website. Don’t know how? Try this:
   1. open a terminal
   2. type ssh username@yourwebsite.com
   3. agree to any host authenticity messages
   4. enter your password at the prompt
2. Navigate to your wp-content directory. Depending on your hosting setup the command will look something like this:cd httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/ or cd httpdocs/wp-content/themes/
3. Get the URL for the plugin or theme you want to download. The full url to the zip file. (This makes it really annoying when plugin developers hide the full url!)
4. Type in wget http://linkto.com/theplugin.zip
5. Wait for the plugin to download onto your server
6. Unzip the file by entering unzip theplugin.zip. If you have a .tar.gz file use tar xfc theplugin.tar.gz.

Done! Now you can go into your wordpress admin panel and activate the plugin or theme.

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