How To Create A New VPS InterWorx User + Shell

The InterWorx interface allows you to create new accounts, which come with the option to enable shell access for each of them. As mentioned in my earlier article on accessing InterWorx, the interface is divided into two sections – SiteWorx and NodeWorx. They correspond to cPanel and WHM respectively. From an administrator’s point of view, you can create new SiteWorx users on your VPN and give then shell access right from the GUI. Let’s see how to do this.

InterWorx Doesn’t Allow Creation of ONLY Shell Accounts

From the InterWorx GUI, to create a new shell user, you need to create a new SiteWorx account first. This is a process that asks you for a bunch of information like the domain name etc – basically setting up a new account itself, with the associated package etc. You can’t just create a new shell user without going through this process.

In Linux however, creating a new shell user from the CLI is a simple one line command. You don’t need to have a separate InterWorx account (or any kind of account). You just need a username and a password.

Since this article is about InterWorx and not the command line interface, I’ll show you how to set up a new SiteWorx account and enable shell access.

Accessing SiteWorx Accounts

Once you log into InterWorx after setting up your VPS account on NameHero, navigate to the SiteWorx section and click “Accounts” as shown here:

This is a list of all current accounts on your VPS server. To get started, click the “Add SiteWorx” button at the top of the page. This will now bring up a screen that asks you a lot of questions:

Remember, you’re not just setting up a shell account, but a new VPS user with their own storage space, bandwidth, databases, and more. So you have to either specify a pre-determined package template, or select all the options one by one from the sections below.

Once you’re done, InterWorx will create the new account.

Enabling Shell Access

By default, new accounts don’t have shell access. We have to specifically enable them. To do this, click “Shell Users” under SiteWorx as shown here:

You’ll now see that the list of shell users has been updated with your “Unix User Name” that you specified in the previous step. To the right, is the status of the shell account which should show as “Disabled” in red. To change the status as shown above, select ONLY that account, then choose “Enable” from the dropdown box and click “Go”.

This will then enable shell access for that specific user. You should receive a confirmation message at the top of the screen afterward as shown here:

And you’re done!

Testing out Shell Access

To access your InterWorx VPS server via SSH, you need to follow the instructions in the earlier tutorial on SSH access. When you’re asked for your credentials, just use the Unix Username and password that you provided when you first created your account as shown here:

You can now inform your new user that they can log into the server via SSH!