I know for many people this is a really really simple task, but I constantly find myself looking this up online and it usually takes me 5-10 minutes before I find a useful result. With this in mind, please enjoy the following snippet.

SSH, OSX and Terminal

I’ll retrace my exact steps here, including hot-keys. First we need to open up the terminal – a basic prompt interface that lives beneath all the bling of OSX. Rather than digging around in your applications folder, just hit apple-spacebar to open spotlight. Type “terminal” and it should show up right away.

Inside the Matrix (Terminal)

Now you can start to feel like a hacker. Thankfully, OSX ships with SSH pre-installed, which makes this tutorial very easy. To connect using SSH you need to type:

“SSH username@www.yourwebsite.com”

After pressing enter you’ll be prompted for two things… a password and a yes/no question asking if you want to add a record of the SSH connection (or something like that). While typing your password you can’t actually see the characters, but it is really working. Also, you need to write a full “yes” or “no” in response to the question…

That’s It!

You should be connected and ready to go. There are many different SSH commands, so I won’t go through those right now, but here are a few to get you started:

• ls – Used to list the contents of a directory
• cd .. – Used to go back (or up) one directory
• cd directory/name – Used to navigate to a directory
• exit – Used to end the SSH session
• pwd – Prints the working directory