- Contents -

What is SFTP?
SFTP in Windows
SFTP in Linux

- SFTP -

Secure File Transfer Protocol, or SFTP, is a way to send files from your computer to the server, or to copy files from the server back to your computer. You have probably heard of FTP, which does the same thing. The difference is that SFTP is encrypted and FTP is not. This is the reason that divineright.org does not support regular FTP.

From Windows

The best SFTP client I know of is WinSCP. It is freely available from Source Forge. Like PuTTY, no installation is required: just download and run it. You will see a window that asks for your connection information first:

Just enter divineright.org as the server, then your username and password. You can actually choose any of the three options: SCP, SFTP, or SFTP with SCP fallback. They should all work equally well. Click the "Login" button to connect to the server.

The first time you connect, you may see a screen that looks like this:

It is safe to click "Yes" on this window. It should only appear the first time you connect to the server.

Once you are connected, you will see the traditional FTP style window with your local machine on the left and your home directory on the server on the right. You can navigate to the files you want to transfer using this interface.

To transfer a file, just drag it from one side to the other and follow the instructions.

From Linux

Using SFTP from linux is easy. Just make sure you have the OpenSSH package installed. You can use the 'sftp' command to connect to a remote server like this:

sftp user@host

After that, the syntax is more or less identical to regular FTP.

An easier way to copy files securely in linux is to use SCP. The syntax is almost identical to the regular cp command for copying files, but with an added syntax for specifying the server the filesystem resides on:

scp [user@host:]<file or files to copy> [user@host:]<directory or filename to copy to>

For example, to copy Test.java from my laptop to my home directory on divineright.org, I would type this:

scp Test.java scion@divineright.org:/home/scion