What application do you use to synchronize work directory with ftp directory?

Question

Hello,

I'd like to poll this question: What application do you use to synchronize the working directory at local PC and remote directory (via FTP)?

I'm kind of bored of using FTP client to transfer each file I edit all the time.

Answer 1

In a simple case you can use scp or ftp command line programs to write a small command line script that can upload all your files. I use a bash script that zips up all my files, puts it on my webspace, and unzips the file over ssh. Although this would be easily done with bash on linux I think that you can do similar with bat files on windows.

For a larger web development project, commit the code to a server side source repository and use a tool like Capistrano to deploy it to remote servers which is a powerful and full featured deployment tool for web application of all kinds.

Answer 2

Maybe its good time to move to subversion, even it is not ftp.

Answer 3

It's probably easier to use a network mount if you're going to poke at files on the server directly. You can do that in Linux/OS X (via FUSE+ftpfs), or in Windows (it can map FTP directories as a network drive, IIRC). I prefer sshfs myself since it means one less service exposed to the network.

But I'd agree with the others - a SCM is better in the long run.

Answer 4

If you are working on files directly then perhaps you should check out a text editor that has native support for working with files on FTP sites. UltraEdit (Windows) and BBEdit (Mac) are two of my favs.

Answer 5

I use Subversion to synchronize the local copy of my website (on which I make modifications) with the live copy: whenever I check in a revision, an SVN hook script automatically updates the live site... so yeah, I agree with everyone else who's recommending a source control system (SVN or perhaps Git). It works quite well for me.

One alternative to consider is rsync, a Linux program which is like scp but only transfers the files that have changed. And even for those, it uses a diff/patch-like algorithm to only transfer the changed parts of the files. Like scp, it normally runs through an SSH tunnel, although there are other modes of operation which are not secure.

Answer 6

Alright, I've checked the FtpDrive - I got windows vista, but it doesn't seem to work and it's error-logging features are equal to Zero. Anyone suggests anything?

Answer 7

ftp upload ought to be dead by now; if you can ssh to the ftp server, scp and rsync -e ssh are much better. there are Windows GUI clients, but I use the Cygwin command line

Answer 8

Although it sounds like the answers so far are sufficient to your needs (the question sounds like you're only uploading changes, not downloading them), the ftp/scp/rsync-based ones are only really suited to one-way synchronization. If you need bi-directional sync (both uploading and downloading changes), then you'll need to go with either a remote filesystem-based solution or (better, IMO) a proper revision control system, such as git, svn, or cvs.