Do you quickly need an SFTP server for testing something on your local developer machine?
Yes?
Here you go…
Setup
Note: I did this on a Mac with Docker Desktop up and running.
First, create a test file that will be uploaded to the SFTP server:
/someotherdirectory/hello_sftp.txt
Then create a directory that will be used as the Docker container volume mount:
/Users/youruser/sftp-in
Finally, create another directory where we will download the previously uploaded file:
/some-download-dir
Now pull the Docker image and run it:
$ docker run -v /Users/youruser/sftp-in:/home/foo/upload -p 2222:22 -d atmoz/sftp foo:pass
Let’s connect to the SFTP server:
$ sftp -oPort=2222 foo@localhost
foo@localhost's password:
Connected to localhost.
sftp>
Everything is in place and we can upload a file.
Uploading a File to the SFTP-Server
With the test file on the host at /someotherdirectory/hello_sftp.txt, upload it:
sftp> put /someotherdirectory/hello_sftp.txt /upload/hello_sftp.txt
Uploading /someotherdirectory/hello_sftp.txt to /upload/hello_sftp.txt
/someotherdirectory/hello_sftp.txt 100% 0 0.0KB/s 00:00
That’s it. The file has been uploaded from your local host (your developer machine) to the SFTP server; the server’s upload directory is a directory on your host.
We can check in three ways that it worked.
On the SFTP server:
sftp> ls /upload
/upload/hello_sftp.txt
On the host:
$ ls /Users/youruser/sftp-in
And from inside the Docker container (first open a shell):
docker exec -ti 743fe6ac65af /bin/bash
Then list the file:
root@743fe6ac65af:/# ls /home/foo/upload/
hello_sftp.txt
Downloading a File from the SFTP-Server
You can also download a file from the SFTP server.
Retrieve the previously uploaded file and save it in another directory:
sftp> get /upload/hello_sftp.txt /some-download-dir/hello_again.txt
Fetching /upload/hello_sftp.txt to /some-download-dir/hello_again.txt
Check it on the host:
$ ls /some-download-dir/
Thanks for reading. Hope it helped!
Feel free to buy me a coffee if you liked this post.