My webhost only provides SFTP access (which is not surprising given what I pay…). But this can become annoying for maintaining things like a package repository where I would like to keep the remote files in sync with my local copy. My first thought was to go with a FUSE based solution in combination with rsync. Looking into the current best options to mount the remote directory (probably sshfs), I was eventually lead to LftpFS and on to its underlying software LFTP.

LFTP is a sophisticate command-line file transfer program with its own shell-like command syntax. This allows syncing from my local repo copy to the remote server in a single command:

lftp -c "open -u <user>,<password> <host url>; mirror -c -e -R -L <path from> <path to>"

The -c flag tell LFTP to run the following commands (separated by a semicolon). I use two commands; the open command (should be obvious what it does…) and a mirror command. The only real “trick” there is to add -L to the mirror command, which makes symlinks be uploaded as the files they point to. This is required as the FTP protocol does not support symlinks and repo-add generates some.

That was exactly what I needed and it makes a nice bash alias being a single command.