CurlFtpFS - ArchWiki

# CurlFtpFS

From ArchWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search
The printable version is no longer supported and may have rendering errors. Please update your browser bookmarks and please use the default browser print function instead.

Related articles

- List of applications/Internet#FTP clients

CurlFtpFS is a filesystem for accessing FTP hosts based on FUSE and libcurl.

Note: As of February 2015, curlftpfs is reported to be extremely slow, see for example a Ubuntu bug report and a stackoverflow.com question.

## Installation

Install the curlftpfs package.

If needed, make sure that fuse has been started.

    # modprobe fuse

## Mount FTP folder as root

Create the mount point and then mount the FTP folder.

    # mkdir /mnt/ftp
    # curlftpfs ftp.example.com /mnt/ftp/ -o user=username:password

If you want to give other (regular) users access right, use the `allow_other` option:

    # curlftpfs ftp.example.com /mnt/ftp/ -o user=username:password,allow_other

Do not add space after the comma or the `allow_other` argument will not be recognized.

To use FTP in active mode add the option 'ftp_port=-':

    # curlftpfs ftp.example.com /mnt/ftp/ -o user=username:password,allow_other,ftp_port=-

You can add this line to /etc/fstab to mount automatically.

    curlftpfs#USER:PASSWORD@ftp.example.com /mnt/exampleorg fuse auto,user,uid=1000,allow_other,_netdev 0 0

Tip: You can use codepage="string" when having problems with non-US English characters on servers that do not support UTF8, e.g. codepage="iso8859-1"

To prevent the password to be shown in the process list, create a `.netrc` file in the home directory of the user running curlftpfs and `chmod 600` with the following content:

    machine ftp.example.com
    login username
    password mypassword

## Mount FTP folder as normal user

You can also mount as normal user (always use the `.netrc` file for the credentials and ssl encryption!):

    $ mkdir ~/example
    $ curlftpfs -o ssl,utf8 ftp://example.com/ ~/example

if the answer is

    Error connecting to ftp: QUOT command failed with 500

then the server does not support the `utf8` option. Leave it out and all will be fine.

Tip: If need be try setting the encoding with for example -o codepage="iso8859-1"

To unmount:

    $ fusermount -u ~/example

## Connect to encrypted server

In its default settings, CurlFtpFS will authenticate in cleartext when connecting to a non encrypted connection port. If the remote server is configured to refuse non encrypted authentication method / force encrypted authentication, CurlFtpFS will return a

    # Error connecting to ftp: Access denied: 530

To authenticate to the ftp server using explicit encrypted authentication, you must specify the ssl option.

    # curlftpfs ftp.example.com /mnt/ftp/ -o ssl,user=username:password

If your server uses a self-generated certificate not trusted by your computer, you can specify to ignore it

    # curlftpfs ftp.example.com /mnt/ftp/ -o ssl,no_verify_peer,no_verify_hostname,user=username:password

For more details, see the curlftpfs(1) man page.

## Troubleshooting

### Unable to access files with '#' in their filename

This is a bug which has been reported in Launchpad bug 783033 in 2011, confirmed in 2013 with no further activity as of writing this. An upstream bug report links to a potential patch.

Categories:

- FUSE
- File Transfer Protocol