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About

Python FTP server library provides a high-level portable interface to easily write very efficient, scalable and asynchronous FTP servers with Python. It is the most complete RFC-959 FTP server implementation available for the Python programming language.

Features

• Extremely lightweight, fast and scalable (see why and benchmarks).

• Uses sendfile(2) (see pysendfile) system call for uploads (Linux only).

• Uses epoll() / kqueue() / select() to handle concurrency asynchronously.

• …But can optionally skip to a multiple thread / process model (as in: you’ll be free to block or use slow filesystems).

• Portable: entirely written in pure Python.

• Supports FTPS (RFC-4217), IPv6 (RFC-2428), Unicode file names (RFC-2640), MLSD/MLST commands (RFC-3659).

• Support for virtual users and virtual filesystem.

• Flexible system of “authorizers” able to manage both “virtual” and “real” users on on both UNIX and Windows.

Performances

Despite being written in an interpreted language, pyftpdlib has transfer rates comparable or superior to common UNIX FTP servers written in C. It usually tends to scale better (see benchmarks) because whereas vsftpd and proftpd use multiple processes to achieve concurrency, pyftpdlib only uses one (see the C10K problem).

Command line usage

Start an anonymous FTP server on port 2121:

$ python3 -m pyftpdlib
[I 2024-06-23 13:49:35] >>> starting FTP server on 0.0.0.0:2121, pid=763634 <<<

Same but with write permissions (useful to setup a quick and dirty file sharing server):

$ python3 -m pyftpdlib --write
[I 2024-06-23 13:49:35] >>> starting FTP server on 0.0.0.0:2121, pid=763641 <<<

Also see CLI doc for more command line examples.

API usage

>>> from pyftpdlib.authorizers import DummyAuthorizer
>>> from pyftpdlib.handlers import FTPHandler
>>> from pyftpdlib.servers import FTPServer
>>>
>>> authorizer = DummyAuthorizer()
>>> authorizer.add_user("user", "12345", "/home/giampaolo", perm="elradfmwMT")
>>> authorizer.add_anonymous("/home/nobody")
>>>
>>> handler = FTPHandler
>>> handler.authorizer = authorizer
>>>
>>> server = FTPServer(("127.0.0.1", 21), handler)
>>> server.serve_forever()
[I 13-02-19 10:55:42] >>> starting FTP server on 127.0.0.1:21 <<<
[I 13-02-19 10:55:42] poller: <class 'pyftpdlib.ioloop.Epoll'>
[I 13-02-19 10:55:42] masquerade (NAT) address: None
[I 13-02-19 10:55:42] passive ports: None
[I 13-02-19 10:55:42] use sendfile(2): True
[I 13-02-19 10:55:45] 127.0.0.1:34178-[] FTP session opened (connect)
[I 13-02-19 10:55:48] 127.0.0.1:34178-[user] USER 'user' logged in.
[I 13-02-19 10:56:27] 127.0.0.1:34179-[user] RETR /home/giampaolo/.vimrc completed=1 bytes=1700 seconds=0.001
[I 13-02-19 10:56:39] 127.0.0.1:34179-[user] FTP session closed (disconnect).

For other code samples read the tutorial

Donate

A lot of time and effort went into making pyftpdlib as it is right now. If you feel pyftpdlib is useful to you or your business and want to support its future development please consider donating me some money.