Ask HN: Do you still use FTP? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do you still use FTP?

8 pointsasadlionpk16 comments

I am checking to see if FTP is still popular deployment method due to its simplicity over git workflow. I am working on a side-project related to it.

What's your deployment workflow like? Do you use plain FTP or SFTP?

Thanks

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I just want to point out for any poor soul who may find themselves on the other end of a request to implement an FTP feature and who may not know this:

FTP is plain text file transfer protocol, there's not really any good reason to use it anymore IMHO

FTPS is an extension to FTP to support SSL/TLS

SFTP is "Secure Shell File Transfer Protocol" (e.g. over SSH)

We had a project once where the customer asked us to use "SFTP" to manage some critical files. This was handled in-app, we added the functionality, did our testing and moved on.

Later when we did integration testing with their system we discovered that what the customer actually meant was to ask us for "FTPS" and we had to rip out the SFTP library with FTPS stuff.

Something similar _almost_ happened a couple of years later in another project (due to miscommunication by someone doing requirements gathering) and this time we caught it early.

>Something similar _almost_ happened a couple of years later in another project (due to miscommunication by someone doing requirements gathering) and this time we caught it early.

Right on. Requirements gathering and problem scoping is refined conversation.

We were in a meeting with someone who wanted us to predict an event that caused losses in the 9 figures 48 hours before it happens and trigger an alert.

48 hours sounded round and arbitrary, so I used "negative framing" and asked "At what point would an alert be useless. At what point is it too late to inform you?"

He said "It's never too late. Even if you predict it two minutes before, we can do things. We have procedures".

Effectively reducing from 48 hours to 2 minutes. This changes the whole thing.

Requirements that are polluted by client's solutions should always be explored further for the actual job to be done, and the actual problem to be solved.

I still use FTP for deploying updates to a few small static sites that I own. These sites get updated a couple of times a year and have no deployment dependencies, so it's easy. I wouldn't use it for deploying serious projects.

Otherwise, I've been using SFTP for a personal project where I'm using it as a part of a document storage API. The documents are managed by a SQLite application that stores their metadata.

FTP servers are easy to set up and aren't bound by someone's ecosystem. Plus, I can use any client I want to access the documents if I need to.

You are asking about deployment workflows. I currently use a variety, but Git, SFTP, rsync are used often. I am also in an environment where much of the work is an internal intranet, so Windows/SMB file sharing is used.

I would NEVER use plain FTP for deployment. You really need some strong encryption for authentication and transfer. If at all possible use SFTP in place of FTP.

I think the only valid use case for FTP is accessing legacy and embedded systems. But only if you control the network. I think it had been at least four years since I had to log into an old FTP system.

For distribution of some plain documents, PDFs etc, our company does maintain a FTP. We usually point the link on a need-to-know basis since AWS download charges can ratchet up quickly. Sometimes a SFTP is needed to do bulk transfer of data. Again, the hard links are never posted anywhere outside of need-to-know group.

Going further, we have a couple of dev offices geographically apart. Large tarballs and/or assets are shared by private P2P.

I use rsynch over ssh for my static site because it handles deltas better than ftp.

I used ftp last week to download a dataset from a vendor. (MolPort distributes chemical datasets over password-protected ftp.)

I haven't upgraded Firefox because they dropped ftp support, and it's really nice to use my browser to view a site, read update notices, etc. before switching to ncftp for the actual data downloads.

I use FTP & SFTP on a share hosting I have had since high school. Old PHP and static sites that don't really benefit from added complexity of anything more than dragging and dropping files or editing on the server directly. Popularity hasn't been super important as long as it continues to work well for me.

I was trying to get Hercules to run OS/360, and had urls that were FTP sites. It was then that the stupidity that Chrome doesn't handle FTP any more was brought back into focus. So I had to use the client built into Windows Explorer, which sucks.

Why not install WinSCP then? It handles FTP fine.

https://winscp.net/

You can also use the portable version without running an installer first:

https://winscp.net/download/WinSCP-5.19.2-Portable.zip

Web browsers should be able to handle all the major URL transport types, it's a new deficiency in Chrome.

I don’t agree. IMO: In 2021, FTP is a legacy protocol for niche use cases. It’s not suitable for a mainstream product such as Chrome.

SFTP is extensively used, and one of the most secure transfer protocols.

FTP is obsolete.

My preference would be pushing my releases to an apt or yum repo. I think both of those do support FTP, but if it takes extra effort I wouldn’t bother.

I stopped doing production FTP about 20 years ago.

Now I use rsync over SSH, or SFTP.

Is it due to rsync doing deltas itself?

Do you revision control this content somewhere?

I use scp now its cool it works

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