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Ryan Harrison My blog, portfolio and technology related ramblings

Sublime Text 3 SFTP Plugin

Amongst one of the best plugins available for Sublime Text 2 & 3 is the SFTP plugin from wbond (who is known for other great plugins including Alignment, SVN and Package Control itself). The SFTP plugin negates the need for using another dedicated SFTP client such as FileZilla when editing documents on a remote server. From the site, it’s features include:

  • Work off of a server - edit and manipulate files and folders
  • Map a local folder to a remote folder
    • Publish files, folders, or just the changes since your last commit
    • Sync folders - up, down or both directions
    • Diff local vs. remote versions of a file
  • Other operations and options to help you get stuff done
  • Password and SSH key auth with SSH agent support
  • Persistent connections for performance

To install, simply open up Package Control through Ctrl+Shift+P, Select Install Package and select SFTP. You then have to configure the plugin for use on your current project. This is done through the SFTP/FTP context menu on the right click context menu of your root directory. Once configured, a sftp-config.json file will be created. This is where you tell the plugin where to map your local directory to on the remote server. The main changes I make are:

  • Make sure type is SFTP not FTP (we like security)
  • I like to set upload_on_save to true so the most recent copy is pushed to the server whenever I save a file (great timesaver)
  • Change host to point to your remote servers IP/domain
  • Change user to whatever user you have SFTP (SSH) setup for on your server.
  • Change port to whatever port you have SSH running on (you shouldn’t really be running on the default 22)
  • remote_path should point to the directory you want to push changes to on your remote server e.g. /home/<user>/project

Finally, you will want to make sure you are authenticating in some way. You could use a password, but you really should be using public key authentication. As such, change the ssh_key_file property to point to the absolute path to your key file. This caused me some confusion initially as I used the id_rsa OpenSSH key I use for SSH under Cygwin. For *nix systems this should work fine, however on Windows it turns out that Sublime uses PSFTP (PuTTY SFTP) instead, so it expects a PuTTY private key file (.ppk extension). If you get a lot of Connection Refused errors from Sublime and No authentication found errors in the SSH logs, this could be the reason. If all is setup correctly, you should be able to push files to the remote server.

The SFTP/FTP menu also provides some additional options such as Syncing your Remote/Local directories and Browsing your remote. Note that this is the ‘Remote’ workflow whereby you are editing a copy of the files on your local machine. There is also a ‘Server’ workflow which allows you to work directly off the server.

Just like Sublime Text itself, the plugin is not officially free. However, the trial never ends - just prompts you to purchase every so often. For more information on the plugin, visit the official page https://wbond.net/sublime_packages/sftp.