How To Use SFTP to Securely Transfer Files with a Remote Server

Awesome tuts. Thanks.

Easier to use FilaZilla - hopefully my tutorial will be here soon.

@Samuel,

Sorry to steal your thunder: <a href=“https://www.digitalocean.com/community/articles/how-to-use-filezilla-to-transfer-and-manage-files-securely-on-your-vps”>How To Use Filezilla to Transfer and Manage Files Securely on your VPS</a>.

-r works with put ?? i am trying , put -r localfile , and it is saying , invalid flag -r

Please help. Using “put -r localDirectory” as a template (I want to upload all the files and folders from a folder on my local machine) I ran: sftp> lpwd Local working directory: /Users/Larry/Documents/Website sftp> put -r .

But the results had errors: Uploading ./ to /var/www/html/. remote open(“/var/www/html/.DS_Store”): Permission denied Uploading of file ./.DS_Store to /var/www/html/.DS_Store failed! remote open(“/var/www/html/.htaccess”): Permission denied Uploading of file ./.htaccess to /var/www/html/.htaccess failed! remote open(“/var/www/html/index.php”): Permission denied Uploading of file ./index.php to /var/www/html/index.php failed!

Not sure what is wrong, or how to fix it. Perhaps locally I have to be one directory above the desired folder to copy?

sftp> lcd … sftp> lpwd Local working directory: /Users/Larry/Documents sftp> put -r Website Uploading Website/ to /var/www/html/Website Couldn’t canonicalise: No such file or directory Unable to canonicalise path “/var/www/html/Website” sftp>

Larry: It looks like you’re trying to upload files into a directory on the remote server that you do not have permission to write to.

There are a few ways around this. You could upload them to a directory on the remote server that you do have access to, like your home directory, and then sign in through SSH and move the files over to the correct location (using sudo or by signing in with root).

Another alternative is to log in as the root user when connecting through SFTP by giving a command like sftp root@your_server_ip. You would then have adequate permissions to transfer the files to the web root as you are attempting to do.

Please write back if you have more questions.

I had changed my ssh port when i configured my server so i use for example ssh -p 4444 username@server_ip_addr

but how can i do the same for sftp i tried sftp -p 4444 username@server_ip_addr but i did not work connection closing

You need to give the argument -oPort

sftp -oPort 4444 username@server_ip_addr

Hey, I can ssh onto my droplet, but if I type “put”, it says “No command ‘put’ found”. It does the same for commands like “lpwd” and “lcd”. Any idea about what’s happening?

alishaaukani+digoc:

You need to use the <code>sftp</code> command instead of <code>ssh</code> when you wish to use the SFTP functionality. This will take you into an SFTP session instead of a normal SSH session, and allow you to use the commands you mention and transfer files.

Let me know if you have any additional questions.