Linux Tutorials - Silicon Dales

How to run WordPress cron with WP CLI via crontab on Cloudways

Sometimes you need to run WordPress cron a non-standard way, in order to guarantee successful execution on a regular schedule. The issue with “standard” WordPress cron tasks (which are a pseudo cron in themselves) is these are processed upon certain triggers, which run under PHP as your admin is loaded. This can both slow life …

How to Block an IP Address from accessing your website

Looking to block a specific IP address from accessing your website? Maybe you saw some rogue activity, and its coming from a specific IP? Perhaps some IP address you can see spidering through all your content – and its not a search robot? Whatever the reason, if you’re looking to block a specific IP address …

Fix Mailgun “550 Sender has no A, AAAA, or MX DNS records.”

Updated 21 May 2020. Sometimes, we setup Mailgun for transactional email, because this helps web based forms, and other, email to get sent to the right place. Its also free, as in beer, at least for the first 10,000 mails a months. But we ran into a deliverability issue on one or two domains, which …

How to: Zip contents of a directory, excluding certain sub-directory

Have you ever wanted to zip an entire directory, but exclude the contents of one or two (or more!) sub-directories, using PuTTy (or another terminal) over SSH. I know I have – this is a great way to backup a website, or make a copy of a website, and exclude big folders you don’t need, …

How to find Apache version via Command Line

A long time ago, we published an item which showed how to discover your Apache version on a Plesk installation. Sometimes, people land in there looking to find their Apache version when they don’t have Plesk.

How to: Find out Apache version from Command Line (SSH)

Have you logged into your server or VPS via command line (SSH – this is really the best and only way to do this now – Telnet is not going to encrypt your communications… this is bad!) and are now wondering how to quickly discover what version of Apache you are running? Find your Apache …

PHP 7.0 Reaches End of Life on 3 December 2018 😱

If you, like us, were thinking Christmas comes round faster and faster each year, then you’ll no doubt think it was only yesterday that the awesome improvements PHP 7.0 brought along with it hit our servers and started powering up our WordPress sites way better than PHP 5.6, which was itself cool for its era.

How to convert colours to black in images using ImageMagick

If you want to convert PNG (or similar) files containing, for example, icons which are in one colour (say green) to black, then the command below will do this. This can be especially useful for updating logos or icons on the fly in a file system, without breaking stride, over command line (SSH). Note you …

How to Get Size of Folder (and all its contents) in Linux / Unix via PuTTy / Terminal

If you ever wanted to know “how big is that directory?” and by this you mean the entire directory, and you have access over SSH, via PuTTy or your command line terminal of choice, to your Linux server or VPS, then there is a little command which will tell you, in useful units, exactly what …

How to find file creation / modified date using Unix commands in terminal window

If you’re ever using PuTTy or another terminal window to SSH into your server and you want to know “how old is that file” (or, at least, what date was it last modified) then the command below will allow you to find out just that information! How to find file creation date using Unix ls …