Q100065: [Connections] FTP

The FTP Connection is a definition which tells a module, how to connect to and communicate with a specific FTP server. Connections can either be entered directly into the parameter in the module, or can be managed through the global connections tool. If you will be using the same connection in different modules, it is much easier to manage the connection information by creating a single global connection. Whether you use a locally defined value in each FTP module, or use the global definitions for your FTP modules, the format of the connection value is the same for both.

If you use the global connection manager, you will see that as soon as you create a new entry, it will provide you a template for starting your FTP Connection definition. It would look like the example below.

Server=<ServerNameOrIP>;Username=<username>;Password=<password>;Protocol=<FTP|SFTP|FTPS>;Port=<PortNumber>

Here we see that there are multiple values specified in this single parameter. Each value is a single name-value pair. You should notice that each of the name-value entries consists of a name on one side, followed by an equals sign (=), followed by the value, and finally terminated by a semicolon. Thus if we breakdown the example above, the list of name-value pairs might appear a little more legible if we look at them this way.

Server=<ServerNameOrIP>;
Username=<username>;
Password=<password>;
Protocol=<FTP|SFTP|FTPS>;
Port=<PortNumber>

Formatted this way, it is much easier to read. The name is on the left of the equals sign, while the value is on the right. Where each value is, you would edit it to use the value which is specific for your installation. In the template, the value on the right side would be replaced by the setting specific for the FTP Connection you are configuring. In the example below, we have configured what a real connection might look like. Notice that the Protocol setting is specified as SFTP and the Port setting is removed. The Port setting is optional and does not need to be specified if the chosen protocol on the target FTP server is running on the default port for that protocol. For SFTP, that would be port 22. So in our example below, we just drop that setting as it will use that by by matter of selecting the SFTP protocol. Note that the older traditional FTP protocol and the FTPS protocol both use a different default set of ports than SFTP does.

Server=ftp.example.com;Username=MyFtpAccount;Password=MyFtpPassword;Protocol=SFTP

If this FTP server did use a different port for the SFTP service, then you would have kept the Port setting from the template and provided the value for the non-default port number the host FTP service is using. We can see an example of this below.

Server=ftp.example.com;Username=MyFtpAccount;Password=MyFtpPassword;Protocol=SFTP;Port=52022