Access DigitalOcean Spaces via SFTP

Hi there,

The DigitalOcean Spaces does not natively support SFTP connections directly. Spaces are designed to be compatible with the Amazon S3 protocol, and thus it offers access via HTTPS using the S3 API.

However, you can still achieve your goal of using SFTP to access DigitalOcean Spaces by setting up an intermediary server that acts as an SFTP server and communicates with Spaces using the S3 API. Here’s a high-level overview of the process:

1. Set up a new Droplet on DigitalOcean or any other VPS provider.
2. Install and configure an SFTP server on the new Droplet, such as OpenSSH or vsftpd.
3. Create a user for SFTP access and set up appropriate authentication methods (e.g., password or key-based authentication).
4. Install a tool like s3fs-fuse on the Droplet, which allows you to mount an S3-compatible bucket (e.g., DigitalOcean Space) as a local filesystem.
5. Mount the Space to a directory accessible by the SFTP user.
6. Configure the SFTP server to restrict the user to the mounted directory.

Once you’ve set up this intermediary server, your legacy application can use SFTP to access the mounted directory, which will be synchronized with the DigitalOcean Space.

For a step by step guide on how to set that up you can follow the steps here:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/how-can-droplet-mount-with-spaces

Alternatively, you could use an S3 client like Cyberduck to access your Spaces:

https://docs.cyberduck.io/protocols/s3/digitalocean/

Hope that this helps!

Best,

Bobby