Question

How to recursively copy files from one server to another via FTP from the command line?

Hi all,

I have a website hosted on another server and I want to transfer the content over to my droplet. The problem is that I only have FTP access to the old server and I don’t want to download all of the files locally on my PC and then upload then to the droplet.

Is there a way to transfer the files from my old server to my Droplet directly via FTP from the command line?

Thanks a lot!

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Bobby Iliev
Site Moderator
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• October 14, 2019
Accepted Answer

Hello,

The last time I had to do that I used wget. First you need to SSH to your droplet, cd to the directory that you would like to store the files at and use wget with the following arguments:

wget -mbr --user="FTP_USER@example.com" --password="YOUR_PASSWORD" "ftp://ftp.example.com/PATH_TO/YOUR_FILES/*"

The arguments:

  • -m - This option turns on recursion and time-stamping, sets infinite recursion depth and keeps FTP directory listings.
  • -b - Go to background immediately after startup. If no output file is specified via the -o, output is redirected to wget-log.
  • -r - Recursively

Hope that this helps! Regards, Bobby