Logs and terminal

Logs#

The Logs tab streams logs from the server — web server, services, and your application's output — without an SSH session.

Use it to answer "what happened just now". You pick a target, and the output streams live as it is written.

For anything older or larger, the log search is the better tool: it queries what is on disk rather than what is arriving, so you can look back past what the stream has shown you.

Your logs stay on your server#

Search is answered by the agent reading the files already on your machine and returning only the lines that match. Nothing is copied to CloudPilot and kept.

That matters because application logs routinely carry personal data — email addresses, IPs, request bodies — and a panel that hoarded them would become a copy of your users' data that you did not ask for.

Terminal#

The Terminal tab opens a real shell on the server, in the browser. It is the same access you would get over SSH, as the same user.

Two things worth knowing:

• It is recorded. Terminal sessions are written to the audit log. That is deliberate — a shell is the one place in CloudPilot where someone can do something the panel has no other record of.
• It is gated by permission. The terminal is not part of a read-only role. See Roles and permissions.

Services and processes#

• Services manages systemd units — restart nginx, check whether something is running.
• PM2 manages Node processes under PM2, including restarting and reading their output.
• Docker lists containers and images, and can pull, run, restart and remove them.

Each of these is a separate permission, so you can let someone restart an application without also letting them remove containers.