gantry-sftp

A modern Python SFTP library that does not implement SSH at all.

OpenSSH already exists and is already installed. gantry-sftp runs it as a subprocess, which hands back a plaintext, framed SFTP byte stream, so there is zero cryptography in this package, and key exchange, host-key verification, ssh_config and ProxyJump are all things you already have rather than things this library reimplements.

What is left is the part that is actually about SFTP: a protocol codec, a request scheduler, and an ergonomics layer.

pip install gantry-sftp

from gantry_sftp.sync import connect

with connect("example.com", user="bob") as sftp:
    sftp.get("/incoming/data.parquet", "data.parquet")

    result = sftp.put("report.csv", "/outgoing/report.csv")
    print(result.mechanism, result.atomic)   # posix-rename True

That upload is atomic by default: the bytes go to a hidden staging file, are flushed, and are renamed over the destination, so a consumer polling that directory sees the old file or the new one and never a half-written one. result says which mechanism it actually got, because every step of it is an optional server extension.

No event loop is needed for any of that. The core is async, written against anyio so it runs on asyncio and trio, and gantry_sftp.sync is a blocking facade over the same code rather than a second implementation of it. If you are writing a script, stay here. If you are writing a service, drop the .sync and add async / await:

import anyio
from gantry_sftp import connect

async def main():
    async with connect("example.com", user="bob") as sftp:
        await sftp.get("/incoming/data.parquet", "data.parquet")

anyio.run(main)

What it needs: read this before you install it

That architecture has a price and it is a single sentence: this library does not implement SSH, so it needs an SSH client. pip install gantry-sftp does not put one there. It is the same sentence as the reason to use it, so it is here rather than at the bottom.

• Python 3.13+
• An ssh binary on PATH, meaning openssh-client. Not a soft dependency, not vendored, and not optional.
• A POSIX host, for transfers. get / put / get_tree / put_tree / sync_tree need offset-addressed local I/O and raise NotImplementedError on Windows, before anything is sent. Everything that only talks to the far end works there. See Requirements for why, and for the full list.
• About 16 MiB of memory per concurrent transfer, which is depth × request size and is independent of the file's size: a 40 GB download costs what a 40 MB one does. Lower depth for a smaller container. If you are on Cloud Run, Lambda or Fly, note also that /tmp is memory there, so a staged download counts against your limit twice. See what a transfer costs in memory, which gives the expression and the way to process a file bigger than the container without staging it.

Your machine already satisfies this and your container probably does not, which is the failure worth pre-empting: it passes locally, then fails on first deploy. Check the image you actually deploy rather than trusting a table. The library will check itself, and needs no server to do it:

$ python -m gantry_sftp doctor
gantry-sftp doctor

local
  library                 0.3.0 (filexfer v3)
  ssh executable          ssh -- a bare name, so PATH decides at spawn time
  ssh version             OpenSSH_10.0p2 Debian-7+deb13u4, OpenSSL 3.5.6 7 Apr 2026
  transfers               supported
  ssh config              /home/bob/.ssh/config
  environment             none of the steering variables are set
  defaults                depth=64 request_timeout=30.0 idle_timeout=60.0

exit 0 (OK)

Put it in the build and the image that cannot work fails its own build instead of a customer's first transfer. The exit codes are distinct so a RUN can tell the cases apart: 0 usable · 3 no ssh binary · 4 platform cannot transfer · 5 host unreachable.

RUN python -m gantry_sftp doctor

Add it in a Dockerfile with whichever your base image uses:

RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y --no-install-recommends openssh-client  # Debian/Ubuntu
RUN apk add --no-cache openssh-client                                            # Alpine
RUN dnf install -y openssh-clients                                               # RHEL/Fedora

python:3.13-slim and Alpine images generally need one of those; full python:3.13 and the Airflow images generally already have ssh. Those are guidance, not guarantees. No CI job here verifies a base image's contents, so the ssh -V check above is the authoritative answer for your image and the sentence you should trust.

Where this library cannot run at all: scratch, distroless images, and managed runtimes with no package manager, such as the AWS Lambda Python runtime. There is no ssh to install and no way to install one, so the answer is a different base image. A Lambda container image can install openssh-client and works fine. This is stated plainly rather than hedged, because finding it out after adopting a library is worse than finding it out now.

If ssh is missing, you get a ConnectError whose hint says all of the above. See when the connection fails.

Documentation

Start with Getting started. After that the guides are shaped by task rather than by module:

examples/ is the other half of the documentation, and it is executed rather than described: one runnable example per user-facing feature, each of which works with no arguments by spawning a real sftp-server on a pipe, and every one of them is run by the test suite. If you would rather read code than prose, start there.

What it does

• Transfers that tell you what happened. get and put return a result object rather than a byte count: which checks ran, which could not, what a resume adopted, whether the timestamps survived.
• Atomic publish by default, with the mechanism named in the result, because every step of it is an optional extension and a downgrade you were not told about is worse than a refusal.
• Resume in both directions, opt-in, and labelled with what it actually proves rather than with a claim that something was proven.
• Content verification on a ladder: server-side hashing where it exists, a re-read where it does not, and a size check that is always available. It reports unavailable rather than success when a rung could not run.
• A zip-slip defence on every recursive download. Server-supplied names are attacker-supplied names, and every one is validated before it reaches your filesystem.
• Bytes end to end, so a filename that is not valid UTF-8 is an ordinary filename rather than a UnicodeDecodeError.
• Typed errors carrying state, not strings. A ConnectError holds OpenSSH's own stderr verbatim, a TransferError holds both paths and the offset it stopped at.
• Timeouts on every wait, including the send, so a transfer cannot hang with nothing to escape it.
• A mirror whose skips carry their evidence. sync_tree sends only what changed, and every file comes back with the reason it was or was not sent — because the dangerous operation in a mirror is the one that does nothing, and a wrong skip leaves stale bytes on the far end under a successful result.
• One connection, many transfers, multiplexed over a single ssh child.
• A pathlib-shaped path object, an fsspec filesystem, and a blocking facade: three ways in besides the async session.

Full detail is in the guides above. python -m gantry_sftp doctor reports what your machine can actually do; benchmarks/README.md is the lane that measures performance, and it writes its figures to a report rather than to this file.

Status

0.3.0, and beta rather than alpha: the feature set is complete and the API can still change. While the major version is 0 a breaking change lands in the minor version, so a patch release is always safe to take. 0.3.0 adds nothing and moves no signature, and it is still a minor release for one reason: a filesystem built with a password= is no longer shared out of fsspec's instance cache, which a program relying on that reuse can notice. Everything else in it is a fix. See CHANGELOG.md for what the change costs and how to opt back out of it.

The protocol layer is complete: all 27 filexfer v3 packet types, encoded and decoded, each with a byte-level fixture asserted in both directions, checked against draft-ietf-secsh-filexfer-02 and OpenSSH's own source. The thesis is proven end to end against a real sshd over a tc netem-shaped link, and against three different server implementations.

CHANGELOG.md has what is in this release and what its known limitations are: Windows transfers refuse by design, ssh is a system dependency, and two more. Where this library is behind is also in Why this exists. Both are written down rather than left for you to find.

How this was built

This library was built with AI assistance. Most of the code and prose here was written by a language model, directed, reviewed and accepted by a human author who is responsible for the result. It is stated because you would reasonably want to know, not because it is an excuse or a selling point.

Humans and models produce slop in roughly equal measure. Neither one is the reason software is good or bad. What decides that is the verification: what is actually tested, what is measured against a real system instead of recalled, and which claims something would catch if they stopped being true. A careful human and a careful model with the same test suite land in the same place, and so do a careless one of each.

So the rules for this repository are aimed at that, and they are enforced rather than professed. The specific failure mode worth designing against is confident plausibility: a packet layout recalled from memory looks exactly like one read off a wire, and a fallback described in a docstring reads exactly like a fallback somebody tested.

• Byte layouts are validated against the source, never from memory: draft-ietf-secsh-filexfer-02 and OpenSSH's own PROTOCOL and sftp.h. Every one of the 27 packet types carries a byte-level fixture asserted on encode and decode, because a codec tested only against its own encoder is tested against nothing.
• Claims about servers are measured, not remembered. Extension behaviour, status codes, and the argument order of SYMLINK (which the reference server reverses relative to the draft) were each settled by asking a real server and keeping the answer. The suite drives the genuine OpenSSH sftp-server, and a matrix lane drives three different implementations, because a fake only ever confirms what its author already believed.
• A prevention claim without a test is a rumour. The table in Why this exists names the test for each row. Documentation facts are pinned the same way: the memory figure is derived from the shipped constants rather than typed, the ssh hint is quoted from the code that produces it, and every link in these documents is checked to resolve.
• Mutation testing on the codec, because a passing suite proves the tests ran, not that they would have noticed.

None of that makes the code correct. It makes the claims checkable, which is the part you cannot verify by reading a diff, and it is the standard this project should be held to no matter who or what typed it.

Requirements

• Python 3.13+
• A POSIX host. Transfers need offset-addressed local I/O: get places every payload with os.pwrite at the offset its request asked for, put reads with os.pread from a worker thread, and preserve_times stamps a descriptor rather than a path. All three are Unix-only in CPython, and they are not incidental: writing at an explicit offset is why writes need no ordering and why a short READ is re-queued rather than restarting the transfer. On Windows get / get_tree / put / put_tree / sync_tree raise NotImplementedError naming what is missing, before anything is sent and before any local file is touched. Everything that talks only to the far end (connecting, listdir, scandir, walk, stat, realpath, rename, remove, mkdir, rmdir, rmtree and check_file) is platform-independent and works there. A Windows fallback is open work, not a decision against it.
• An ssh binary on PATH (openssh-client). Windows ships one at %SystemRoot%\System32\OpenSSH\ssh.exe. The container story, the install commands and the platforms where this cannot run are on the first screen, under What it needs, rather than repeated here. One copy, so the two cannot drift.
• openssh-server, only to run the real-server test lane, never at runtime.

Development

The suite runs with no network, no containers and no keys. It drives the genuine OpenSSH sftp-server over a pipe:

uv sync --all-extras
.venv/bin/python -m pytest

Development covers the rest: the CI matrix, the controlled ssh environment every security assertion depends on, and the four lanes that run longer than a commit hook: leak detection, tc netem link shaping, benchmarks, and mutation testing.

Security

Found something? Please report it privately — open a security advisory, or email kevin@oneil.xyz if you would rather not use GitHub.

SECURITY.md has the reporting scope and the security model has the trust boundary in full. The scope is worth reading before you start: this library contains no cryptography and does not implement SSH, so a finding about ciphers or host-key algorithms belongs to OpenSSH rather than here. What is ours is everything a hostile server can send us, how we build the ssh argument vector, and where a credential can end up.

License

Apache-2.0.