Recently I've had to do a couple of projects which were hosted on bargain-basement FTP-only hosting.

I don't really have any problems keeping development versions up-to-date thanks to sitecopy, but when it comes to installing the final app, there are always things that really could do with a shell. Even if it's just unzipping files or rsyncing a dev directory to a live directory

There are plenty of scripts which allow you to run arbitrary commands on remote servers via php's system() function, but they were lacking options I'd like to see, mainly command and filename completion, and progressive download of script output. 

So I spent a few hours building something which would scratch that itch. The result is phpajaxshell.

Here's a quick video to show you how it works:

Get it on github. comments powered by Disqus