How to SFTP with PHP?

I have came across many PHP scripts for web FTP clients. I need to implement a SFTP client as a web application in PHP. Does PHP support for SFTP? I couldn't find any samples. Can anyone help me with this?

Solution 1:

PHP has ssh2 stream wrappers (disabled by default), so you can use sftp connections with any function that supports stream wrappers by using ssh2.sftp:// for protocol, e.g.

file_get_contents('ssh2.sftp://user:[email protected]:22/path/to/filename');

or - when also using the ssh2 extension

$connection = ssh2_connect('shell.example.com', 22);
ssh2_auth_password($connection, 'username', 'password');
$sftp = ssh2_sftp($connection);
$stream = fopen("ssh2.sftp://$sftp/path/to/file", 'r');

See http://php.net/manual/en/wrappers.ssh2.php

On a side note, there is also quite a bunch of questions about this topic already:

• https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=sftp+php

Solution 2:

The ssh2 functions aren't very good. Hard to use and harder yet to install, using them will guarantee that your code has zero portability. My recommendation would be to use phpseclib, a pure PHP SFTP implementation.