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# FTP

- `ftp://username:password@server:port/path?passive=yes|no`
- `ftps://username:password@server:port/path?passive=yes|no`

FTP is a very old but well supported protocol. Lektor can publish through it but to speed up the operation it has to make certain concessions. In particular it needs to maintain a “listing file” to remember the state of the files as FTP does not support any form of file comparisons. This means that you cannot use Lektor in addition to another system to publish files to your FTP server. It's an either/or thing.

If you have alternatives to using FTP it's recommended to use those. FTP is a very simple transport format, very slow, underspecified, largely insecure and not very portable.

The system supports FTP (`ftp://`) and FTP over TLS (`ftps://`). Passive mode can be enabled/disabled with the optional `?passive` parameter. It defaults to true.

## Example

    [servers.production]
    target = ftps://myuser:mypassword@ftp.example.com/var/www/example

## Credentials

FTP is considered a largely insecure protocol for Lektor. As such if you want to use it you should keep your project file safe as credentials will be most likely embedded there. Alternatively you can set the credentials via the command line with the `--username` and `--password` option (or via the environment variables `LEKTOR_DEPLOY_USERNAME` and `LEKTOR_DEPLOY_PASSWORD`) though this will mean that most likely deploys via the admin interface will fail as the values will not be available there.

## Implementation

If you want to know how the FTP sync process works, here is how the system figures out what to sync and what not. When it synchronizes it maintains a “listing file” in `.lektor/listing`. This file contains the checksums of all uploaded artifacts. If that file desynchronizes with the actual files that were uploaded it can be deleted and Lektor will sync up everything. The file is modified through append operations and at the end of the sync duplicate entries in that file are resolved.

## Using Other Tools

The FTP support in Lektor is quite rudimentary and in some situations you might want to use a different tool like filezilla to do your synchronizations instead. In that case you just need to point your FTP client to the build folder. To find out where this is, just run this command:

    $ lektor project-info --output-path

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