How to transfer an entire website via ftp with recursive lftp

12 Jan 2009 Matteo Mattei linux ftp tricks

In these days I have to transfer some big websites from a server to another and the only way to do it was an FTP connection because the destination server did not provide any other type of access. Because of the number of files was big (about 12GB) I have created a little script to use with lftp opened into a screen session to don’t busy the terminal for days.

So I created a script called sendfiles.sh with the following content:

set ftp:ssl-allow no
open -u username,password example.com
mirror -c -R /source-path /destination-path
quit

Where the following fields are respectively:

username: user name for ftp access
password: password for ftp access
example.com: ftp destination server
source-path: source path on local server
destination-path: remote path on the ftp (where / is the ftp rootdir)

To run the script is sufficient to open a screen session (if you want to leave the process in background on the source server) and issue this command:

lftp -f sendfiles.sh