Learning to use the command line is one of the hardest things about moving to Linux, however once you’re used to it, doing things becomes second nature and you actually miss being able to use the terminal in those cases where you have FTP access but no shell account. For some things using a GUI is laborious, upgrading web apps is a major case in point.

One way of getting around this is the curlftpfs package. The software allows you to mount your FTP account and access it as you would any other part of your Linux File System.

After installing the package, you may have to modprobe fuse and may have to add your user to the fuse group. The former was necessary on Suse 10.2 and the latter on Kubuntu Feisty. After that simply create the folder you wish to use as a mount point and issue the command.

curlftpfs -v ftp://user:pass@ftp.somewhere.net/ MountPoint/

Once everything is working you can do away with the -v which enables verbose output. This is great if you need to do work on a web app where there is no shell access.

Caution

It is easy to forget this is not shell access, commands like unzip, unrar etc will use the binary on your machine with the resulting backwards forwards data transfer. Use such commands at your peril if working on an unstable connection, with large files or if you don’t have a backup.

Whilst this can be used with the rails command (again not recommended), bear in mind that you’ll need to copy the contents of the vendor directory to the server manually, as this is normally symlinked when working on the shell.

References

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_FTP_Mount

Rowan :: Sep.02.2007 :: Linux, Quick Solutions, Web Apps, Web Hosting :: No Comments »