Using wget to recursively download whole FTP directories

I want to copy all of the files and folders from one host to another. The files on the old host sit at /var/www/html and I only have FTP access to that server, and I can't TAR all the files. Regular connection to the old host through FTP brings me to the /home/admin folder.

I tried running the following command form my new server:

wget -r ftp://username:[email protected]

But all I get is a made up index.html file.

What the right syntax for using wget recursively over FTP?

Solution 1:

Try -m for --mirror

wget -m ftp://username:[email protected]

Solution 2:

You have it right, you just need a trailing * on the end:

wget -r ftp://username:[email protected]/dir/*

For shared servers, you can use like this:

wget -r ftp://1.2.3.4/dir/* --ftp-user=username --ftp-password=password

Because most shared servers has ftp-username something like username@hostname, so, the first wget command not works, and second command works fine.

Solution 3:

Besides wget, you may also use lftp in script mode. The following command will mirror the content of a given remote FTP directory into the given local directory, and it can be put into the cron job:

lftp -c 'open <hostname>; user <username> <password>; mirror -e <remote-src-path> <local-dest-path>; quit'

It automatically handles recursion into directories and allows specifying the remote source starting directory from to download data from.