/home/<username>) and lets you do everything you’d normally do over FTP, without installing anything.
Open it from cPanel home → Files → File Manager.
What’s on the page
The interface has three regions:- Top toolbar with the actions you take on selected files (File, Folder, Copy, Move, Upload, Download, Delete, Restore, Rename, Edit, HTML Editor, Permissions, View, Extract, Compress)
- Left sidebar with the directory tree of your account
- Right pane with the contents of the current folder, showing Name, Size, Last Modified, Type, and Permissions
What you can do
| Action | Where to click |
|---|---|
| Upload files | Upload in the top toolbar. Drag and drop is supported |
| Create a file or folder | + File or + Folder in the top toolbar |
| Edit a file in the browser | Select a file, click Edit (plain text) or HTML Editor |
| Compress folders | Select files or folders, click Compress, pick zip or tar.gz |
| Extract an archive | Right-click an archive, or select it and click Extract |
| Change permissions | Select a file, click Permissions, set the numeric mode |
| Rename or move | Rename or Move with the file selected |
| Delete or restore | Files go to .trash first. View Trash to recover, Empty Trash to free the space |
Tips
- Hidden files. cPanel hides dotfiles by default. Click Settings in the top right and tick Show Hidden Files to see
.htaccess,.env, and similar. - Trash recovery. Deletes go to
.trashfirst, not straight to oblivion. Recoverable via View Trash until you empty it. The trash counts toward your disk quota, so empty it once you’re sure. - Editing config files. For a single
.htaccessor.envline change, File Manager is faster than SSH or FTP. - Large uploads. For files over a few hundred MB, the browser uploader can stall. Use Web Disk to mount your account as a network drive and copy files natively from Finder or File Explorer.