Using FTP to Sync

Today, I discover a very exciting and useful tool, lftp. I was looking for a way to sync my client’s work on my development machine with client’s production machine. Even though the project is stored on SVN. I have no SSH access to the client production machine. The only access to the machine is FTP. After some searches, I found lftp. The thing I like about it, is that it is possible to script ftp to automate future synchronization. That is an excellent and important feature to have.

This is what I have in my lftp script file, lftp.script

open serverhost
user username password
lcd localdirectory
cd remotedirectory
mirror -R --only-newer

When I want to sync the directory, I just run the command “lftp -f lftp.script”. This will synchronize the two directory. Of course, this is the last option if client machine does not have SSH and/or SVN installed.

More information about lftp tool can be found here, http://lftp.yar.ru/