Using Python pysftp – Download, Upload files

Today in this article, we will see how to use Python pysftp – Download, Upload files via SFTP. We will retrieve a file from a server via SFTP and upload the file to a remote server using a package library called pysftp.

Today in this article, we will cover below aspects,

pysftp is a simple interface to SFTP and provides abstractions and task-based routines to perform SFTP file upload or download operations.

It is basically a Python library that provides an interface to interact with remote servers using the SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP).

It allows you to securely transfer files and perform various operations on remote SFTP servers programmatically.

Installing the Python pysftp package

Let’s install the ‘ pysftp ’ package to connect and pass commands to the SFTP server.

pip install pysftp 

Or create a requirements.txt file and declare your dependencies.

pysftp >= 0.2.6

pip install -r requirements.txt

SSH Client – Import pysftp

We can use the Secure method of the pysftp package. SSH clients can be used to communicate with an SFTP server for the transfer of files.

So, we import our installed package Paramiko and create the SSH client in the following manner.

Let’s add the required import statement in the python file,

import pysftp

Define custom SFTPCLient class

To simplify the python code implementation, we will create a simple class called SFTPClient.

class SFTPClient:
 
    def __init__(self, hostname, username, password, port):

SFTP Secured Connection using pysftp

Let’s define the connection and startup class below,

class SFTPClient:
 
    def __init__(self, hostname, username, password, port):

        
        self.hostname = hostname
        self.username = username
        self.password = password
        self.port = port
        self.connection = None

Note: SFTP connection using other authentication methods, such as SSH key-based authentication is recommended. Kindly refer to more details here.

Define connect method – pysftp

def Connect(self):
            self.connection = pysftp.Connection(
                host=self.hostname,
                username=self.username,
                password=self.password,
                port=self.port,
            )

SFTP Upload file – pysftp

Let’s define the upload file method,

def upload(self, local_path, remote_path):
 
    self.connection.put(localpath=local_path,
                         remotepath=remote_path)

SFTP Download file – pysftp

Let’s define the download file method,

def download(self, remote_path, local_path):
 
        self.connection.get(remote_path, local_path,
                             callback=None)

SFTP Close connection – pysftp

if you need to explicitly close the connection, you can use the close connection method defined below,

def close(self):

    self.connection.close()

That’s all now you can use the FTP client class defined above to Upload or Download files easily as below,

Upload files,

client = SFTPClient(host, port,
                    username, password)
 
 
client.upload(upload_local_path,
              upload_remote_path)
 
client.close()

Download files,

client = SFTPClient(host, port,
                    username, password)
 
client.download(download_remote_path,
                download_local_path)
 
client.close()

Do you have any comments or ideas or any better suggestions to share?

Please sound off your comments below.

Happy Coding !!

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