title: FTP
---
summary: Automatic deployments via FTP
---
body:

* `ftp://username:password@server:port/path?passive=yes|no`
* `sftp://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 comparisions.  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 (`sftp://`).  Passive mode
can be enabled/disabled with the optional `?passive` parameter.  It defaults
to true.

## Example

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

## Note on Credentials

FTP is considered a largely insecure protocol for Lektor.  As such if you
want to use it you should keep your project file save as credentials will
be most likely embedded there.  Alternatively you can set the credentails
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 synchronziations
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
```