Provided by: git-ftp_1.3.1-1_all 
NAME
Git-ftp - Git powered FTP client written as shell script.
SYNOPSIS
git-ftp <action> [<options>] [<url>]
DESCRIPTION
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.
ACTIONS
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.
download (EXPERIMENTAL)
Downloads changes from the remote host into your working tree. This feature needs lftp to be in‐
stalled 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. This feature needs lftp to be installed.
snapshot (EXPERIMENTAL)
Downloads files into a new Git repository. Takes an additional argument as local destination di‐
rectory. 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.
OPTIONS
-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.
-P, --ask-passwd
Ask for FTP password interactively.
-k [[user]@[account]], --keychain [[user]@[account]]
FTP password from KeyChain (Mac OS X only).
-a, --all
Uploads all files of current Git checkout.
-A, --active
Uses FTP active mode.
-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.
--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 nor‐
mally 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.
--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.
--version
Prints version.
URL
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
DEFAULTS
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
After setting those defaults, push to john@ftp.example.com is as simple as
$ git ftp push
SCOPES
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 environ‐
ment.
$ 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
IGNORING FILES TO BE SYNCED
Add patterns to .git-ftp-ignore and all matching file names will be ignored. The patterns are interpret‐
ed as shell glob patterns.
For example, ignoring everything in a directory named config:
config/*
Ignoring all files having extension .txt:
*.txt
Ignoring a single file called foobar.txt:
foobar.txt
SYNCING UNTRACKED FILES
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, a paired tracked file will trigger the deletion of the remote file
on the server.
When using the --syncroot option, all paths are relative to the set syncroot. If your source file is
outside the syncroot, add a / and define a path relative to the Git working directory.
# upload "dist/style.css" with syncroot "dist"
style.css:/style.scss
It is also possible to upload whole directories. For example, if you use a package manager like compos‐
er, 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.
DOWNLOADING FILES (EXPERIMENTAL)
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 in‐
spect 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 op‐
tion --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.
HOOKS (EXPERIMENTAL)
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 para‐
meters are the same as given to the pre-ftp-push hook. This hook is not bypassed by the --no-verify op‐
tion. It is meant primarily for notification and its exit status does not have any effect.
NETRC
In the backend, Git-ftp uses curl. This means ~/.netrc could be used beside the other options of Git-ftp
to authenticate.
$ editor ~/.netrc
machine ftp.example.com
login john
password SECRET
EXIT CODES
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
KNOWN ISSUES & BUGS
The upstream BTS can be found at <https://github.com/git-ftp/git-ftp/issues>.
AUTHORS
Git-ftp was started by Rene Moser and is currently maintained by Maikel Linke. Numerous conributions
have come from Github users. See the AUTHORS file for an incomplete list of contributors.
git-ftp User Manual 2016-12-03 GIT-FTP(1)