How to add secure FTP capabilities to a .NET application

Question

I'm rewriting an in-house client-server application as a .NET MVC application. It needs to send and receive files via secure FTP. The original application was client-server and used MOVEit Freely to do SFTP. Is there a library or product I can use to do it from within .NET?

Answer 1

http://www.enterprisedt.com/products/edtftpnet/overview.html

Answer 2

Just use the built-in FtpWebRequest and FtpWebResponse classes.

Answer 3

Have a look at SharpSSH, I know they have support for sftp, don't know how hard it will be to write the server side.

Answer 4

Our Rebex File Transfer Pack supports both variants of Secure FTP - the SFTP and FTPS (FTP/SSL).

Answer 5

If you don't want to pay anything, you can easily use the built-in FtpWebRequest for vanilla FTP and FTPES (explicit FTP with SSL). For FTPS (implicit FTP+SSL), I recommend Alex FTPS Client. And finally, for SFTP (FTP over SSH), you can use SharpSSH. This method isn't for everyone - it's really just for the cheap skate. But, I've been using this combo for all my data transfer needs in a production environment and it works great. The products are stale, but the protocols are stable, so who cares.

Answer 6

Take a look at edtFTPnet/PRO, which offers full support for SFTP in .NET.

You might also want to take a look at CompleteFTP, which is a fast, compact SFTP server for Windows platforms (it also supports FTP and FTPS).

I might add that using the term "Secure FTP" can be rather confusing. It can mean SFTP, which is a secure file transfer protocol that runs over SSH. Or it can mean FTPS, which is basically standard FTP commands running over an SSL connection.

Answer 7

This is native in .NET. The classes you want resides in the System.Net namespace. Take a look at FtpWebRequest and FtpWebResponse classes. Happy coding :)

Answer 8

I was involved in creating MOVEit Freely. It never had support for SFTP over SSH - it only had support for FTP/S. Its original role was to be a "drop-in" command-for-command replacement of Microsoft's FTP.exe client - with extra support for SSL/TLS.

MOVEit Freely was originally built on top of a Dundas FTP/S stack, but we heavily modifed the original source code as FTP/S evolved. (We got in a bit early.) These days Dundas is focused on Dashboard components and the license agreement we signed with Dundas said that we'd never publish a standalone FTP/S component based on their code. (That's standard for that kind of OEM license.) In other words, I'd check out one of the Windows-based recommendations above. (I recommend components from \n software, and also like the Rebex offering on Windows.)