Secure FTP

evan18h

I need to connect to a SFTP server but I cant find any documentation on it... how can I do this?

LordShryku

There's nothing built into php for it. You may want to write a shell script instead.

ZibingsCoder

SFTP = Simple File Transfer Protocol...right?

I think I'm going to make a class to deal with SFTP connections via sockets. nodnod Will post back with results on how it goes.

[edit]
A note to posters. Never go out to eat during the middle of a post. Upon returning, you may forgo re-reading the title of a post and realizing that you are now thinking of an entirely incorrect possible solution. Case in point... 😉

evan18h

dont know if it means that.... what I ment was a secure ftp.... like SSH 2 with SFTP
dont know... what ever sourceforge.net uses

tsinka

Hi,

PHP doesn't support SFTP (only SSL-FTP). Either use a shell script like mentioned by LordShryku or do something like this (but this might be overkill):

Check if your PHP installation supports java (might need to recompile)
Install JSch and use JSch from within PHP.

There is a link to examples (including a sftp example) on that page.

Thomas

ZibingsCoder

Why don't we start a big project to add SFTP support to PHP? Could be fun for those of us who do more than just PHP, and could help people such as evan here. shrugs

LordShryku

Wouldn't think it'd be that hard. In fact, I'm pretty sure a script could be pretty easily made with sockets and CLI...

ZibingsCoder

I'm in...just need to find somewhere that describes how to do a general SFTP connection...

LordShryku

Same as ftp, only encrypted over port 22.
http://www.xbill.org/sftp/oldindex.html

ZibingsCoder

Oh...well...guess we could just create an extension to load that into the mix.

LordShryku

Then again, I remembered that the ftp functions already allow you to specify a port, so I'll see what I can dig up from there.

ZibingsCoder

Yeah...no go there. Tried ftp_connect() with different options, as well as ftp_ssl_connect().

LordShryku

Okay, well, we know the easy way is out 🙂

I'll see what I can do with sockets today...

LordShryku

Well, I did some playing around with this, and some studying, and it's not possible with just sockets. There's allusions to the possibility of it being done with curl, but nothing solid. The curl people have a team together to try to build support for this into curl, but not done yet.

There is some hope though, depending how far you want to take it. More nix systems have sftp installed already, so interacting with that shouldn't be too hard. Windows could download putty sftp, which also has full command line capability. I'm willing to pitch in if someone wants to have a go at trying to make this...

ZibingsCoder

coughs There is always the possibility of creating an actual extension to PHP in C. 😃 😃 I'd -love- to do that with a few people.