Article: Automating File Uploads with SSH and Ruby

Thanks for the good write up. But if you only care about to get the job done, wouldn't rsync be a good solution?

Absolutely. But it's more fun to write it in Ruby. :)

You may be required to have something similar in your app. And your app is required to work on a platform without rsync or at least to not require external dependencies that may be missing from the system. So, you are left to creating something, and this article shows you how to do it.

./alex
--
.w( the_mindstorm )p.
________________________
Alexandru Popescu
Senior Software Eng.
InfoQ TechLead&CoFounder

FYI to other slack hackers trying to follow along :

I had to add "require 'rubygems'" as the first line of code to get net/ssh and net/sftp to load, presumably because I used the "ports" command on Mac OS X to setyp my ruby/gems environment...

I got ERROR: Error installing gem net-ssh[.gem]: buffer while trying to install net-ssh,net-sftp in Windows, I installed Ruby via latest one click installer version 1.8.4.0. After searching on google I found out comment on Jamies Buck's blog weblog.jamisbuck.org/2007/5/10/net-ssh-1-1-1 for the solution.
After following command
C:\>gem update rubygems-update

and gem install net-ssh and net-sftp
both gems installed successfully.


Thanks for great article

Shame about the two bits of nasty code otherwise this would make a great introduction to Ruby.
Great article all the same!

The first one is that sftp.mkdir(remote_dir, :permissions => dir_perm) is _wrong_ it should be sftp.mkdir(remote_dir, :mode => dir_perm)

This will get by on some platforms, but not others like ubuntu feisty. I'm really not sure why. #setstat is the same way, it should be :mode.

Also, the way in which this recurses will break for many people. If you have a file two directorys up from the directory you started recursing from, and the inbetween directory has not been created yet, this script will break.

Also its not very scalable because its calling stat on the remote directory for every single file, and then on each remote file. This is really slow. This is from the net-sftp faq:

handle = sftp.opendir("/usr/lib")
items = sftp.readdir(handle)
items.each do |item|
puts item.filename
puts item.longname
p item.attributes # permissions, atime, etc.
end
sftp.close_handle(handle)

So if you could create a hash or something like that to check against for each file rather then it could scale.

I'm working on a rails backup system that uses this technique and will post code when it gets good enough.

thanks, this article was very helpful for what i was doing

This example was great- I've never done anything with ruby before and I was able to modify it for my needs in two days, saving me hours and hours of tedious file uploads and downloads. I had to change a few things though, the biggest one being that sftp.put_file() doesn't seem to be supported anymore and I had to use ssh.sftp.upload() instead. Maybe it's something with the new versions of net::ssh and net::sftp? Thanks for the great intro to ruby!

Thanks for this I was leaning how to use SSH and this is just what I needed!

Now I have to work on this to make it handle something else:
using a zip archiver with `` commands and zip only the files with a timestamp > X.
So it could be really fast if I disable outputs like "Copying D:/html/images/stop.gif to /home/public_html/images/stop.gif", and it would only send one file before asking the server to unzip it.
Thanks very much maybe I will soon only need to do some keyboard shorcut to synchronise all I need.