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A site’s Commands tab runs a shell command against the live release and streams the output back. php artisan migrate, php artisan cache:clear, a one-off script.

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Where it runs

In the live release, in the application directory, as the site’s own account — exactly like a deploy script. A command cannot reach the machine beyond the site it was run against. The same SHIPWAYS_* variables are in the environment, so $SHIPWAYS_PHP gets this site’s PHP version rather than the machine’s CLI default.

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It is bounded

A command is stopped after 120 seconds by default. That is short on purpose: this is somebody waiting on a page, and a command that never returns would hold the server’s queue lane for as long as the agent allows. Anything longer belongs in a deploy script or a scheduled job. Self-hosted installations can change the limit with SHIPWAYS_COMMAND_TIMEOUT.

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Permission

Running a command needs permission to change the site, because a command can do anything the deploy script could. It is not the same as opening a shell on the server, which is root on the machine. This is the site’s account and nothing more.

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History

Every command is kept with who ran it and what it printed. That is the point of using this rather than SSH: the next person wondering what happened to production has somewhere to look.