git-ftp - Man Page

git-ftp <action> [<options>] [<url>]

Git-ftp is an FTP client using Git (http://git-scm.org) to determine which local files to upload or which files to delete on the remote host.

It saves the deployed state by uploading the SHA1 hash in the .git-ftp.log file. There is no need for Git to be installed on the remote host.

Even if you play with different branches, git-ftp knows which files are different and handles only those files. That saves time and bandwidth.

init

Uploads all git-tracked non-ignored files to the remote server and creates the .git-ftp.log file containing the SHA1 of the latest commit.

catchup

Creates or updates the .git-ftp.log file on the remote host. It assumes that you uploaded all other files already. You might have done that with another program.

push

Uploads files that have changed and deletes files that have been deleted since the last upload. If you are using GIT LFS, this uploads LFS link files, not large files (stored on LFS server). To upload the LFS tracked files, run git lfs pull before git ftp push: LFS link files will be replaced with large files so they can be uploaded.

download (EXPERIMENTAL)

Downloads changes from the remote host into your working tree. This feature needs lftp to be installed and does not use any power of Git. WARNING: It can delete local untracked files that are not listed in your .git-ftp-ignore file.

pull (EXPERIMENTAL)

Downloads changes from the remote host into a separate commit and merges that into your current branch. If you just want to download the files without a merge, consider download. This feature needs lftp to be installed.

snapshot (EXPERIMENTAL)

Downloads files into a new Git repository. Takes an additional argument as local destination directory. Example: `git-ftp snapshot ftp://example.com/public_html projects/example` This feature needs lftp to be installed.

show

Downloads last uploaded SHA1 from log and hooks `git show`.

log

Downloads last uploaded SHA1 from log and hooks `git log`.

add-scope <scope>

Creates a new scope (e.g. dev, production, testing, foobar). This is a wrapper action over git-config. See Scopes section for more information.

remove-scope <scope>

Remove a scope.

help

Shows a help screen.

-u [username], --user [username]

FTP login name. If no argument is given, local user will be taken.

-p [password], --passwd [password]

FTP password. See -P for interactive password prompt. (note)

-P,  --ask-passwd

Ask for FTP password interactively.

-k [[account]@[host]], --keychain [[account]@[host]]

FTP password from KeyChain (macOS only).

-a,  --all

Uploads all files of current Git checkout.

-c,  --commit

Sets SHA1 hash of last deployed commit by option.

-A,  --active

Uses FTP active mode. This works only if you have either no firewall and a direct connection to the server or an FTP aware firewall. If you don’t know what it means, you probably won’t need it.

-b [branch], --branch [branch]

Push a specific branch

-s [scope], --scope [scope]

Using a scope (e.g. dev, production, testing, foobar). See SCOPE and Defaults section for more information.

-l,  --lock

Enable remote locking.

-D,  --dry-run

Does not upload or delete anything, but tries to get the .git-ftp.log file from remote host.

-f,  --force

Does not ask any questions, it just does.

-n,  --silent

Be silent.

-h,  --help

Prints some usage information.

-v,  --verbose

Be verbose.

-vv

Be as verbose as possible. Useful for debug information.

--remote-root

Specifies the remote root directory to deploy to. The remote path in the URL is ignored.

--syncroot

Specifies a local directory to sync from as if it were the git project root path.

--key

SSH private key file name for SFTP.

--pubkey

SSH public key file name. Used with –key option.

--insecure

Don’t verify server’s certificate.

--cacert <file>

Use as CA certificate store. Useful when a server has a self-signed certificate.

--disable-epsv

Tell curl to disable the use of the EPSV command when doing passive FTP transfers. Curl will normally always first attempt to use EPSV before PASV, but with this option, it will not try using EPSV.

--no-commit

Stop while merging downloaded changes during the pull action. A commit is made anyway, but the merge is interrupted. If you just want to download the files you could also consider the action download.

--changed-only

During the ftp mirror operation during a pull command, consider only the files changed since the deployed commit.

--no-verify

Bypass the pre-ftp-push hook. See HOOKS section.

--enable-post-errors

Fails if post-ftp-push raises an error.

--auto-init

Automatically run init action when running push action

--version

Prints version.

-x [protocol://]host[:port], --proxy [protocol://]host[:port]

Use the specified proxy. This option is passed to curl. See the curl manual for more information.

The scheme of an URL is what you would expect

protocol://host.domain.tld:port/path

Below a full featured URL to host.example.com on port 2121 to path mypath using protocol ftp:

ftp://host.example.com:2121/mypath

But, there is not just FTP. Supported protocols are:

ftp://...

FTP (default if no protocol is set)

sftp://...

SFTP

ftps://...

FTPS

ftpes://...

FTP over explicit SSL (FTPES) protocol

Don’t repeat yourself. Setting config defaults for git-ftp in .git/config

$ git config git-ftp.<(url|user|password|syncroot|cacert|keychain|...)> <value>

Everyone likes examples:

$ git config git-ftp.user john
$ git config git-ftp.url ftp.example.com
$ git config git-ftp.password secr3t
$ git config git-ftp.syncroot path/dir
$ git config git-ftp.cacert caCertStore
$ git config git-ftp.deployedsha1file mySHA1File
$ git config git-ftp.insecure 1
$ git config git-ftp.key ~/.ssh/id_rsa
$ git config git-ftp.keychain user@example.com
$ git config git-ftp.remote-root htdocs
$ git config git-ftp.disable-epsv 1
$ git config git-ftp.no-commit 1

After setting those defaults, push to john@ftp.example.com is as simple as

$ git ftp push

If you run into issues with setting up your password please check this note.

Need different config defaults per each system or environment? Use the so called scope feature.

Useful if you use multi environment development. Like a development, testing and a production environment.

$ git config git-ftp.<scope>.<(url|user|password|syncroot|cacert)> <value>

So in the case below you would set a testing scope and a production scope.

Here we set the params for the scope “testing”

$ git config git-ftp.testing.url ftp.testing.com:8080/foobar-path
$ git config git-ftp.testing.password simp3l

Here we set the params for the scope “production”

$ git config git-ftp.production.user manager
$ git config git-ftp.production.url live.example.com
$ git config git-ftp.production.password n0tThatSimp3l

Pushing to scope testing alias john@ftp.testing.com:8080/foobar-path using password simp3l

$ git ftp push -s testing

Note: The SCOPE feature can be mixed with the Defaults feature. Because we didn’t set the user for this scope, git-ftp uses john as user as set before in Defaults.

Pushing to scope production alias manager@live.example.com using password n0tThatSimp3l

$ git ftp push -s production

Hint: If your scope name is identical with your branch name. You can skip the scope argument, e.g. if your current branch is “production”:

$ git ftp push -s

You can also create scopes using the add-scope action. All settings can be defined in the URL. Here we create the production scope using add-scope

$ git ftp add-scope production ftp://manager:n0tThatSimp3l@live.example.com/foobar-path

Deleting scopes is easy using the remove-scope action.

$ git ftp remove-scope production

Add patterns to .git-ftp-ignore and all matching file names will be ignored. The patterns are interpreted as shell glob patterns since version 1.1.0. Before version 1.1.0, patterns were interpreted as regular expressions. Here are some glob pattern examples:

Ignoring everything in a directory named config:

config/*

Ignoring all files having extension .txt:

*.txt

Ignoring a single file called foobar.txt:

foobar.txt

Ignoring Git related files:

.gitignore
*/.gitignore      # ignore files in sub directories
*/.gitkeep
.git-ftp-ignore
.git-ftp-include
.gitlab-ci.yml

The .git-ftp-include file specifies intentionally untracked files that Git-ftp should upload. If you have a file that should always be uploaded, add a line beginning with ! followed by the file’s name. For example, if you have a file called VERSION.txt then add the following line:

!VERSION.txt

If you have a file that should be uploaded whenever a tracked file changes, add a line beginning with the untracked file’s name followed by a colon and the tracked file’s name. For example, if you have a CSS file compiled from an SCSS file then add the following line:

css/style.css:scss/style.scss

If you have multiple source files, you can add multiple lines for each of them. Whenever one of the tracked files changes, the upload of the paired untracked file will be triggered.

css/style.css:scss/style.scss
css/style.css:scss/mixins.scss

If a local untracked file is deleted, any change of a paired tracked file will trigger the deletion of the remote file on the server.

All paths are usually relative to the Git working directory. When using the --syncroot option, paths of tracked files (right side of the colon) are relative to the set syncroot. Example:

# upload "html/style.css" triggered by html/style.scss
# with syncroot "html"
html/style.css:style.scss

If your source file is outside the syncroot, prefix it with a / and define a path relative to the Git working directory. For example:

# upload "dist/style.css" with syncroot "dist"
dist/style.css:/src/style.scss

It is also possible to upload whole directories. For example, if you use a package manager like composer, you can upload all vendor packages when the file composer.lock changes:

vendor/:composer.lock

But keep in mind that this will upload all files in the vendor folder, even those that are on the server already. And it will not delete files from that directory if local files are deleted.

WARNING: It can delete local untracked files that are not listed in your .git-ftp-ignore file.

You can use git-ftp to download from the remote host into your repository. You will need to install the lftp command line tool for that.

git ftp download

It uses lftp’s mirror command to download all files that are different on the remote host. You can inspect the changes with git-diff. But if you have some local commits that have not been uploaded to the remote host, you may not compare to the right version. You need to compare the downloaded files to the commit that was uploaded last. This magic is done automatically by

git ftp pull

It does the following steps for you:

git checkout <remote-commit>
git ftp download
git add --all
git commit -m '[git-ftp] remotely untracked modifications'
git ftp catchup
git checkout <my-branch>
git merge <new-remote-commit>

If you want to inspect the downloaded changes before merging them into your current branch, add the option --no-commit. It will stop during the merge at the end of the pull action. You can inspect the merge result first and can then decide to continue or abort.

git ftp pull --no-commit
# inspect the result and commit them
git commit
# or abort the merge
git merge --abort

If you abort the merge, the downloaded changes will stay in an unreferenced commit until the Git garbage collector is run. The commit id will be printed so that you can tag it or create a new branch.

This feature is experimental. The interface may change.

Git-ftp supports client-side hook scripts during the init and the push action.

pre-ftp-push is called just before the upload to the server starts, but after the changeset of files was generated. It can be bypassed with the –no-verify option.

The hook is called with four parameters. The first is the used scope or the host name if no scope is used. The second parameter is the destination URL. The third is the local commit id which is going to be uploaded and the fourth is the remote commit id on the server which is going to be updated.

The standard input is a list of all filenames to sync. Each file is preceeded by A or D followed by a space. A means that this file is scheduled for upload, D means it’s scheduled for deletion. All entries are separated by the NUL byte. This list is different to git diff, because it has been changed by the rules of the .git-ftp-include file and the .git-ftp-ignore file.

Exiting with non-zero status from this script causes Git-ftp to abort and exit with status 9.

An example script is:

#!/bin/bash
#
# An example hook script to verify what is about to be uploaded.
#
# Called by "git ftp push" after it has checked the remote status, but before
# anything has been pushed. If this script exits with a non-zero status nothing
# will be pushed.
#
# This hook is called with the following parameters:
#
# $1 -- Scope name if set or host name of the remote
# $2 -- URL to which the upload is being done
# $3 -- Local commit id which is being uploaded
# $4 -- Remote commit id which is on the server
#
# Information about the files which are being uploaded or deleted is supplied
# as NUL separated entries to the standard input in the form:
#
#   <status> <path>
#
# The status is either A for upload or D for delete. The path contains the
# path to the local file. It contains the syncroot if set.
#
# This sample shows how to prevent upload of files containing the word TODO.

remote="$1"
url="$2"
local_sha="$3"
remote_sha="$4"

while read -r -d '' status file
do
    if [ "$status" = "A" ]
    then
        if grep 'TODO' "$file"; then
            echo "TODO found in file $file, not uploading."
            exit 1
        fi
    fi
done

exit 0

post-ftp-push is called after the transfer has been finished. The standard input is empty, but the parameters are the same as given to the pre-ftp-push hook. This hook is not bypassed by the –no-verify option. It is meant primarily for notification and its exit status does not have any effect.

If your password contains special characters you have to take it with care. In most cases it is a good idea to quote passwords with single quotes:

--passwd '#my$fancy!secret'

Mostly --ask-passwd works even if --passwd does not work. So maybe you can give this a try.

If your password starts with a hyphen/dash (-) even quoting might fail. This is by design (https://github.com/git-ftp/git-ftp/issues/468) and will not be fixed. In this case you can use one of the other options to set your password: the defaults feature using git config, --ask-passwd or ~/.netrc.

Quoting also works if a default is set with git config:

$ git config git-ftp.password '#my$fancy!secret'

$ editor ~/.netrc
machine ftp.example.com
login john
password SECRET

git ftp init ftp.example.com

$ git ftp init --keychain account@host ftpes://host

$ git config git-ftp.keychain account@host

$ security add-internet-password -a account -r "ftp " -s host -w secr3t

There are a bunch of different error codes and their corresponding error messages that may appear during bad conditions. At the time of this writing, the exit codes are:

1. Unknown error
2. Wrong Usage
3. Missing arguments
4. Error while uploading
5. Error while downloading
6. Unknown protocol
7. Remote locked
8. Not a Git project
9. The pre-ftp-push hook failed
10. A local file operation like cd or mkdir failed

The upstream BTS can be found at <https://github.com/git-ftp/git-ftp/issues>.

Git-ftp was started by Rene Moser and is currently maintained by Maikel Linke. Numerous contributions have come from GitHub users. See the AUTHORS file for an incomplete list of contributors.