Secure FTP (SFTP) Extension for zc.buildout

The zc.buildoutsftp package provides a zc.buildout extension that provides support for SFTP. To use it, simply provide the option:

extensions = zc.buildoutsftp

in your buildout section. Then you can use sftp URLs for find-links or index URLs.

An SFTP URL is similar to an FTP URL and is of the form:

sftp://user:password@hostname:port/path

where the user name, password, and port are optional. Here are some examples:

The following URL accesses the path /distribution on download.zope.org:

sftp://download.zope.org/distribution

The following URL accesses the path /distribution on download.zope.org using the user id jim:

sftp://jim@download.zope.org/distribution

The following URL accesses the path /distribution on download.zope.org using the user id jim and password 123:

sftp://jim:123@download.zope.org/distribution

The following url accesses the path /distribution on download.zope.org using an ssh server running on port 1022:

sftp://download.zope.org:1022/distribution

The buildout extension actually installs a urllib2 handler for the “sftp” protocol. This handler is actually setuptools specific because it generates HTML directory listings, needed by setuptools and makes no effort to make directory listings useful for anything else. It is possible that, in the future, setuptools will provide it’s own extension mechanism for handling alternate protocols, in which case, we might bypass the urllib2 extension mechanism.