3.7.3 Managing users in ISPmanager4 with administrator rights
One of the important differences between the ISPManager4 panel on hosting and on other services is the ability to create separate users with their own rights, restrictions and separate settings. This is a consequence of obtaining superuser rights root, which you cannot get on shared hosting.
What capabilities does this imply?
- The ability to have several separate users on one server with their own access parameters;
- These users can already create separate FTP accounts, etc.;
- Each of them can be assigned a list of rights as well as strict limits on resource use;
- Each user also has separate settings, including the PHP version and the libraries activated for it;
- Users are completely separated in their access rights to each other’s information, which, together with all of the above, creates the potential for resellers.
By and large, having a service with ISPManager4 and root rights, you can create a functional copy of our hosting, with your clients as your users.
Creation, rights and restrictions
After receiving access parameters to your server, go to the ISPManager control panel.
While in the panel, you can start creating the first user.
1. Go to the Users tab and click Create in the upper right corner:
2. A form for creating a new user will open. In the first of its tabs, you will need to give the user a name and password, and also (optionally) assign an IP or domain. Pay attention to the Template column. In the example, it is set to custom, which allows you to set custom values for this user. Later in the instructions, we will show how to create your own user templates:
Tip: You can select the IP address that will be assigned to the user’s domains by default when creating it, using the IP address column. It is possible to assign the same IP to multiple users.
3. The next tab is Rights. Here you need to determine what rights the future user will have. In our example, we have issued all possible rights:
Important: a user who does not have the CGI and PHP as CGI rights will only be able to use method of working with PHP PHP as an Apache module. Which in turn means that only one specific version of PHP will be available to him. Which one exactly depends on the image of the installed OS.
4. The last of the tabs is Restrictions. These are limits on the use of certain server resources for the specified user. Simply put, an analogue of his “tariff plan”. In the example, we limited the account to 5000 MB of hard drive space and 5 domains, sites and databases:
Additional: setting the limit value to 0 is equivalent to no limit.
After which you can click Ok which will create a user with the specified access parameters, rights and limitations. It will immediately appear in the list of existing ones in the Users tab.
Navigation
With root access, you can log into your users and perform actions on their behalf without even knowing their access parameters. Your ability to access them is unconditional.
You can do this in the Users tab, by selecting the desired one with a mouse click and pressing Login in the upper right corner:
This also works in other tabs where there is a Login button in the upper right corner. For example, in the WWW domains tab, you can select a user’s domain and immediately log into their account.
By logging in to the user in this way, you will be able to see the following picture in the upper right corner of the panel:
The root button is clickable. You can always return to the admin panel without having to re-authorize.
Changing the PHP version
With root rights, you can create an unlimited number of regular users, for each of whom you can select their own PHP version in the PHP Settings tab. This way, you can use an unlimited number of different PHP versions on one service, which is not available for hosting.
Changing the version is very simple. Log in to the user as shown below:
Then change the version using the already described algorithm:
If the client has PHP set to operate as PHP as CGI in the WWW domains tab (to do this, you need to grant him such rights in the Users tab under root), then there will be no problems.
Creating templates
As you may have noticed above, when creating a user, you can assign a previously created template to him.
To do this, go to the Settings -> Templates tab and click Create in the upper right corner.
The template creation form is not much different from the window for creating a new user, but it has a couple of nuances.
First, you can limit the number of emails sent by the user in the Resources: tab
Second, you can set up the encoding, index page, and default PHP handler for the template in the WWW tab:
Additionally: leaving the Encoding and Index Page fields blank will cause the ISP panel to assign default values to WWW domains, i.e. utf8 and index.html/index.php respectively. These are the values we recommend leaving unless there are special requirements.
For example, a combination of CGI and PHP as CGI rights along with a PHP as CGI handler in the WWW tab will allow clients to choose the default PHP version without requiring any additional actions from them.
Functionality not available to users
Your users will not have access to a wide range of functionality that is only available to the administrator by default.
Among the most important functions:
- Restart the entire server and its services.
- The Server Settings tab, where you can change the hostname and time zone.
- Change the configuration of Nginx/Apache domains in the WWW Domains tab.
- The IP List tab and related settings.
- Install new PHP/Perl/Python plugins.
- Setting up access rights to panel functions via the Module access tab
- Changing the panel address and all panel-related settings (HTTP access, for example) in the Panel address tab.
- Brand settings tab.
- Setting up default DNS records in the DNS settings tab.
- No access to many logs and statistical information in the Statistics section.
And much more. Therefore, users will not be completely autonomous in some matters.
If you need to create a superuser other than root, you can do this in the Administrators tab, with a list of functions available to him.
