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Easy SFTP uploading with paramiko

paramiko makes it so easy to use SFTP that it's hard to believe it's legal in this day and age. Command Line Warriors has a wonderful post showing how to use paramiko to do SFTP uploads/downloads.

In this post, I want to share a small helper module called sftp (zip file) (code in post below) that wraps paramiko.SFTPClient and makes uploading/downloading via SFTP even simpler.

First, some usage

Upload or download a file

server = sftp.Server("user", "pass", "example.com")
# upload a file
server.upload("/local/path", "/remote/path")
# download a file
server.download("remote/path", "/local/path")
server.close()

with statement also supported:

with sftp.Server("user", "pass", "example.com") as server:
server.upload("/local/path", "/remote/path")

Finally, a demo recipe for uploading all the png files from a specified local directory to a specified directory on the server:

# needed for python 2.5
from __future__ import with_statement

import sftp
import glob
from os import path

remote_dir = "/path/on/remote/server/"

with sftp.Server("user", "pass", "www.example.com") as server:
for image in glob.glob("/local/path/to/*.png"):
base = path.basename(image)
server.upload(image, path.join(remote_dir, base))

Now, here's the code for my sftp module:

import paramiko

class Server(object):
"""
Wraps paramiko for super-simple SFTP uploading and downloading.
"""

def __init__(self, username, password, host, port=22):

self.transport = paramiko.Transport((host, port))
self.transport.connect(username=username, password=password)
self.sftp = paramiko.SFTPClient.from_transport(self.transport)

def upload(self, local, remote):
self.sftp.put(local, remote)

def download(self, remote, local):
self.sftp.get(remote, local)

def close(self):
"""
Close the connection if it's active
"""

if self.transport.is_active():
self.sftp.close()
self.transport.close()

# with-statement support
def __enter__(self):
return self

def __exit__(self, type, value, tb):
self.close()

Vasu

January 15th, 2010 at 7:42 am

I’d modify the put/get code to have pipelining (in the new paramiko) as this will be extremely slow for large files. Looks very good though making the server class..

knktc

May 2nd, 2012 at 12:57 pm

Hello! I have a question: It is too slow when I use your module as a sftp client to transfer large files(300MB or larger). I’ve googled a lot and don’t know why… Could you please help me?