Looking for a recommended FTP program

February 4, 2007 6:16 AM

Ubuntufilter: Looking for a recommended FTP program on Ubuntu: must cope with SFTP, must have an 'edit' button to allow me to edit files on the remote server. A bit like WinSCP (for the WIndows) or Cyberduck (for Mac).
posted by jamescridland to Computers & Internet (13 answers total)

Filezilla
posted by thilmony at 6:24 AM on February 4, 2007

I can't swear to the remote editing, as I haven't used that particular feature myself, but gFTP seems to fit your bill and is in the repositories.
posted by Abiezer at 6:40 AM on February 4, 2007

Best answer: It's in "universe", but you might consider "sshfs". It makes the remote ssh server appear as a directory on your system, so that any program can read or write those files.

After installing the sshfs package, you have to add your user to the new group called "fuse", and create a new directory "mountpoint". Then execute a command like:

mount remoteserver: mountpoint

to create the connection with the server. If you use 'remoteserver:' you'll see all files in your home directory on the remote machine; if you use 'remoteserver:/' you'll see all files.

Later, use 'fusermount -u mountpoint' to disconnect from the server.
posted by jepler at 7:06 AM on February 4, 2007

I like the FireFTP Firefox extension better than any standalone FTP client I've ever used. 100k to download and completely cross-platform - runs inside any Firefox.

It currently doesn't have either of the features you asked for, but it's only in beta, so it's worth keeping an eye on.
posted by flabdablet at 7:13 AM on February 4, 2007

Filezilla doesn't exist for Ubuntu, gFTP does what you want but I was rather disappointed by it's lack of quality. I would second sshfs.
posted by furtive at 7:26 AM on February 4, 2007

Ubuntu does have the Linux port of Filezilla in edgy-backports and feisty. It's beta2 which is slightly old (I think they're at beta5 now, see Filezilla Project for details).

I just installed the Debian package from testing (also beta2) and it seems to work alright.
posted by skynxnex at 8:22 AM on February 4, 2007

This relates to KDE but you can certainly run this stuff in Gnome. I'm not sure that GNOME or any others offer these capabilities but I have not heard of any. KDE offers KIO which are IO slaves that allow very cool things to be done. First, Konqueror can act as an FTP/SFTP client which makes it very easy for moving files around. Now, for editing, you can just use the standard KDE editors using KIO to access the remote files. I often times use kate to edit remote scripts and it is amazingly smooth.
posted by chrisroberts at 8:34 AM on February 4, 2007

Response by poster: Many thanks, all. SSHFS looks right for me. If I can work out how to install it. (Bit of a newbie to Ubuntu, and linux in general: I've run it in the past but this is the first time it's stayed on any laptop for longer than a month or so).
posted by jamescridland at 10:23 AM on February 4, 2007

Response by poster: For anyone who finds this later...

1. Follow the instructions on the Ubuntu blog

I needed to type

sudo chown root:fuse /dev/fuse

...after the installation to get this to work.

2. Use Applications>Add/Remove to find and install gPHPEdit (if you want to have nice markup for PHP like I do)

3. Just use file/open as normal, and you're editing on the live server at the other side of the world/room (delete as appropriate)

Brill. Thank you.
posted by jamescridland at 11:12 AM on February 4, 2007

James,

'Connect to Server' under Ubuntu's 'Places' menu will let you open a file manager window over SSH without any extra software involved.

While you're at it, you may also be interested in jEdit, which is what I use to edit files remotely / do web dev work with.
posted by genghis at 3:42 PM on February 4, 2007

I've been suffering through gFTP on my Ubuntu 6.06/Dapper machine. The way it handles overwrites and lack of ascii/binary autoselection are completely retarded, and frankly inexcusable in a mature ftp program. On the other hand, it's been usable enough for me to not actually move on to another program ... maybe this thread will help me change that :)
posted by intermod at 8:04 PM on February 4, 2007

Use Nautilus, the file manager (which is what genghis said with the "Connect to Server" menu item).

I use it all the time, and my remote documents over sftp work natively, in general. Images open up in E-O-G, sounds and movies play in Totem, and I can edit files in gedit (and save them directly).

This is because GNOME has something called "gnome-vfs", which a lot of applications use. Neat!
posted by a007r at 1:48 PM on February 7, 2007

gnome-vfs does work well for GNOME apps, but using sshfs instead of the sftp support in GNOME means that you have non-GNOME app choices as well.

I've never really understood why the GNOME team felt a need to reinvent "mount".
posted by flabdablet at 6:31 PM on February 7, 2007