[Techtalk] Collaborating on websites without ssh

[Lisa Kachold]

Hi Akkana,

Please see my [bottom posted suggestions below]:

On Sun, Aug 31, 2014 at 9:08 PM, Akkana Peck <akkana at shallowsky.com> wrote:

> I'm helping a local nonprofit with its website. There are three of
> us working on it right now, and things are going great, except for
> one thing: the cheap web host we have for this site doesn't offer
> ssh, just ftp.
>
> I'm totally spoiled, having always had ssh and rsync (or better yet,
> a version control system). I don't need ssh to log in to a live
> shell; I just want to be able to rsync files between the live server
> and my local machine, to make sure I've downloaded everybody else's
> changes before I start changing things myself. My attempts so far at
> elaborate lftp scripts to mirror the website don't seem to work very
> well -- they take forever, lose chmod information, re-download
> unchanged files yet sometimes miss changed ones. And ftp-ing files
> back up to the server is a pain because of needing to keep track of
> which directory I'm in on each end (lcd ../data; cd ../data;
> mput ...; lcd ../resources; cd ../resources; mput ...  and so on).
>
> This must be a common problem. Does anyone have any advice for
> keeping in sync with other people's changes and uploading lots of
> files when neither ssh/rsync nor version control is an option?
> Are there rsync-like tools that cheap webhosts offer even if they
> don't offer ssh? Or rsync-like wrappers on top of ftp?
>
>         ...Akkana
>

I would address both the questions of ftp/backup tools and version control
tools to the host itself.

If they can't address your questions successfully, I would STRONGLY
consider moving the site.  You can turn down the TTL on your DNS to
minimize propagation time so the move will be painless.

You can get 2 free minimal VPS at AWS (Amazon) free for a year?  EC2 AWS
allows for key based ssh/sftp and YOU manage the whole server, which I find
is very wonderful to ensure security and backups.

Considerations:

Before we can successfully brainstorm solutions, you need to determine the
OS of the hosting system.  I.E. is this BSD, Linux, Windows?

Another consideration is the type of FTP available.  Does the server
support passive FTP.  FTP itself can be a difficult problem for any
developer.

But for your solution to transfer or back up files, without moving your
site, I have the following recommendations (assuming Linux):

1. http://drush.ws/  (If your site is Drupal)  [Alternately, if you have
space and mysql, add Drupal just for using drush - it's an easy 15 minute
install.

2. http://php.net/manual/en/wrappers.ftp.php  If you can write or cut,
splice, debug code, you can use this ftp module to build out a custom
solution (run from cron).   Example scripts exist on github.com:

https://github.com/myflowpl/git-ftp  Allows files transfer via http or
command line interface.

https://github.com/Wanchai/FTPbucket  Allows you to sync your BitBucket
account with any FTP account.

https://github.com/GregOriol/PushFTP  A PHP script to handle pushing files
to an FTP/SFTP from an SVN/Git repository.
https://github.com/adamdburton/github2ftp  Uploads your [free] GitHub
repository to an ftp server using webhooks.
https://github.com/dg/ftp-deployment FTP deployment is a tool for automated
deployment to an FTP server.

3. Python Scripts for ftp sync and git:  Explained:
http://ftputil.sschwarzer.net/trac

https://github.com/dz3/FTP-Sync  Python script to sync any directory on
your local machine with a remote FTP directory.

https://github.com/dapine/pybkp A Python backup manager using FTP

https://github.com/Johanndutoit/Zip-to-FTP-Backup A Zip to FTP Backup Tool

https://github.com/Foxboron/PyProjectUpdater Easy way to update your python
projects with a Git/SVN/FTP Repo
-- 

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