Category: Git

Git SFTP

I was working for an elementary website of a friend of mine. I pushed the website to GitHub so it’s was way easier to maintain the site.

But I thought it must be easier than transferring all the changes every time by an FTP program. So I found git-ftp and of course FTPS didn’t work out of the box 😉

Windows

What you have to do to enable GIT FTP (on Windows)

First start an ssh sessions from powershell

ssh username@SOMEHOSTNAME

This will add the public key to you known host. Otherwise you will get this error later

fatal:  Can't access remote 'sftp://SOMEUSER:***@SOMEHOSTNAME'. Network down? Wrong URL? exiting...

You can see this with the -vv parameter

git ftp init -vv

Now it’s time to install git-ftp

  • First go to c:\program files\git
  • Then run git-bash as administrator

And install git-ftp (bin is an alias for program files)

$ curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/git-ftp/git-ftp/master/git-ftp > /bin/git-ftp
$ chmod 755 /bin/git-ftp

No go to your project and enter these commands

git config git-ftp.user SOMEUSERNAME
git config git-ftp.url sftp://SOMEHOSTNAME/public/sites/SOMEWEBSITE/
git config git-ftp.password SOMEPASSWORD
git ftp init

And the next time you make a change you only have to do

git ftp push

Linux (Debian)

For linux the steps are much easier.

First start an ssh sessions from bash

ssh username@SOMEHOSTNAME

This will add the public key to you known host. Otherwise you will a error later.

Now install ftp-git

$ sudo apt install git-ftp

No go to your project and enter these commands

git config git-ftp.user SOMEUSERNAME
git config git-ftp.url sftp://SOMEHOSTNAME/public/sites/SOMEWEBSITE/
git config git-ftp.password SOMEPASSWORD
git ftp init

And the next time you make a change you only have to do

git ftp push

When you get an errors like these:

zo 19 dec 2021 23:11:50 CET: Retrieving last commit from sftp://******:***@s*******/public/sites/*********/.
*   Trying *********:22...
* Connected to ******* (********) port 22 (#0)
* Found host ******** in /home/******/.ssh/known_hosts
* Set "ecdsa-sha2-nistp256" as SSH hostkey type
* Closing connection 0
curl: (79) Error in the SSH layer

zo 19 dec 2021 23:11:50 CET: fatal: Could not get last commit. Use 'git ftp init' for the initial push. Can't access remote 'sftp://******:***@********'. Network down? Wrong URL? exiting..

Then try the --insecure parameter

git ftp push -vv --insecure

Happy uploading 🙂