Mac os ftp with terminal

How to Run FTP or SFTP Server in macOS?

As you can see, since the update on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, the system has lost the ability to enable an FTP server for sharing files and folders. It’s unclear why Apple removed the graphical interface for enabling FTP sharing, but you can still start a local FTP (or SFTP) server on macOS using the command line.

If you use the command line, you probably noticed that the latest versions of macOS do not have FTP file transfer protocol.

By default, FTP is not installed in the latest versions of the system, but this does not mean that you cannot install the protocol yourself. Modern versions of macOS use SFTP instead of FTP. SFTP has more secure encryption.

However, some users still prefer FTP. If you don’t need FTP, then there’s no reason to install it.

Table of Contents

How to Install FTP in macOS

If you still haven’t installed Homebrew on a Mac, you need to do this before proceeding with the instructions below.

We will do this by installing inetutils. And this is done through Homebrew. If you haven’t Homebrew in your system, you can take script for Homebrew installing here.

Installation Using inetutils

The inetutils file contains: FTP, FTP server, telnet and telnet server, as well as rsh, rlogin, tfp servers and clients, etc. If you need FTP protocol, it will not hurt to install the entire set.

To do this, use the following command:

When Homebrew finishes installing inetutils, you can run the FTP command as usual. For example, you can connect to the gnu.org server to check that everything worked out.

One of the advantages of this method is that you also get other useful tools in the kit, and you will not need to install them manually.

How to Start FTP and SFTP Server in macOS

Naturally, it is possible to download a separate server and many do, but why, if the mac out of the box already has a built-in ftp / sptp server, which is enough for most tasks. Simply, the built-in server is disabled by default and we just need to enable it. This is what we will do.

Start FTP server in macOS

First, start the Terminal (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) and run the following command:

Check if the server is working with the ftp localhost command. If you see something similar in the terminal window:

So everything turned out and the server works. To connect to the server, use your account or create a new one, especially for ftp connections (which will be more correct from a security point of view). To access files on the server, use the “connect to server” command in the Finder or using any ftp client.

Start SFTP server in macOS

As you know, the FTP server transmits data in unencrypted form and, as a result, for security reasons, it is not very reliable.

To exchange information securely, you need to use an SFTP server, for this:

• If, for security reasons, you still need to encrypt the transmitted data, then enter the “System Preferences”->“Sharing”;

• Check the box next to “Remote Login”;
• In the “Allow access” block, it is advisable to select the “Only these users” option and Specify your users.

You can also test the operation of this server using with command:

ATTENTION.

FTP and SFTP servers may conflict with each other and it is not recommended to keep them enabled at the same time.

Server Shutdown

The built-in SFTP server is disabled by unchecking the Remote login option in the system settings.

You can disable the FTP server in the terminal using the command:

Conclusion

If this is the first login to the server, then the client will offer to remember the host to which the connection is made. You can confirm this action by typing the word “yes” in the console and pressing the “Enter” key. Otherwise, type “no” and press “Enter”.

Next, you need to enter a password, if all the data has been entered correctly, the client will successfully connect to the server.

It’s the best time to ask questions and give us your feedback in comments.

Hi there! My Name is Vincent Lago! My goal is to share insightful reviews, guides, and manuals for people looking to know more about current solutions for Apple hardware and OS. I have years of technological background knowledge including owning a custom iMacs & PCs which was using for different types of business. And now, I want to share my experience with you.

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12 Comments

would you please share the content of your http://ftp.plist? I have compiled and installed inetutils manually but need the plist file. I dont want to use homebrew. Thank you

Greetings! Try this link. I hope this is what you are searching for.

This doesn’t start:

jason$ sudo -s launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ftp.plist
Password:
/System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ftp.plist: No such file or directory
Mac-mini:

Hi, Jason! Just try to check or correct your path…?

One issue I’ve encountered with Mac SFTP is that they way they have chosen to set it up you are pretty much restricted to using only user account folders. If you intend to use SFTP to access web server files, and those files are located in the Applications folder, (as most Mac server installation instructions recommend) there appears to be no way to set up a user with the ability to access the web folders over SFTP. Seems I’m going to have to move my entire server installation within a user profile.

Or am I missing something?

Hi, Chris! Thank you for your comment. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you a direct solution, because I have not encountered such a specific problem before. Try looking at “stackoverflow” solutions or asking a question.

Chris,
I have been plagued by the same issue. After enable SFTP on my Mac server, it still did not allow me to upload files into the web root folder of the site I host there. Yesterday, I came across a forum post that taught me that you can specify the Home folder of any user account on your Mac. I tried it, and it works great! Here’s how:
1. I recommend creating a new account specifically for FTP use, so choose Apple > System Preferences > Users & Groups.
2. Click the Lock icon and enter your Mac admin credentials, if necessary.
3. Click the small plus sign (+) in the lower-left to add a new account.
4. For the account type, choose Standard. It may work with Sharing Only, but I haven’t tried it.
5. Make up an account name and password for FTP-ing, and click Create User.
6. Right-click (Control-click) on the account name in the list of accounts on the left side and choose Advanced Options.
7. Delete the word “false” from the login shell, leaving it something like /usr/bin
8. Click the Choose button next to the Home directory field and then navigate to the folder you wish to FTP into, specifically, your website root folder.
9. Click OK all the way out.

There were two other things you might have to do:

1. Change the folder permissions on your web root folder.
a. In Finder, navigate to your web root folder and click it once to select it.
b. Click File > Get Info. The Get Info pane opens. Near the bottom, you see Sharing & Permissions.
c. Click the Lock icon and enter your Mac admin credentials.
d. Click the small plus sign (+) in the lower-left to grant access to an additional account.
e. Select the FTP account that you created earlier.
f. Grant Read & Write privileges to that account.
g. Click the small gear icon (Settings) and choose Apply to enclosed items.
h. Close the Get Info pane.

2. Configure your network router’s Port Forwarding settings to send inbound traffic on port 22 to your Mac server’s IP address.

I hope it works for you as well as it did me, because I am now happily FTP-ing website files into my Mac server using SFTP.

Wondering if you have any thoughts….

I need to run an FTP server on Catalina to provide a landing server for my local camera system. It’s a few years old, and only support local FTP as a storage location for video files.

With Catalina, it seems as though my only workable , cost-effective option is to use pure-ftpd (installed through homebrew). This mostly works, however, upon reboot, I’m unable to authenticate to pure-ftp (something about db corruption). BUT….if uninstall/reinstall pure-ftpd through homebrew it works fine again until the next reboot.

Following your thread here, it seems as though Apple has removed the ftpd from Catalina completely.

Any ideas? Not wanting to shell out $200-$500 for a commercial FTP solution. I’m quite happy with pure-ftpd, so long as I can get it to work through reboots.

Hey, Jay! Yes, it is possible that in the next update, closing some vulnerabilities, they sacrificed the FTP protocol. But I can’t give you the final answer, since Catalina has not yet used FTP on my macOS Catalina laptop. At High Sierra, everything worked without problems. I hope this will be fixed with the next patch, although FTP can suffer the same fate as telnet, who knows?

Hi Vincent,
Following the guide for “How to Run FTP or SFTP Server in macOS”, when I ran brew install online I got a bunch of errors:

Louise$ brew install online
Updating Homebrew…
==> Auto-updated Homebrew!
Updated 1 tap (homebrew/core).
==> Updated Formulae
docker-compose jenkins [email protected]
duplicity [email protected] vault-cli

Error: No available formula with the name “online”
==> Searching for a previously deleted formula (in the last month)…
Warning: homebrew/core is shallow clone. To get complete history run:
git -C “$(brew –repo homebrew/core)” fetch –unshallow

Error: No previously deleted formula found.
==> Searching for similarly named formulae…
Error: No similarly named formulae found.
==> Searching taps…
==> Searching taps on GitHub…
Error: No formulae found in taps.

Is thee another formula I could use to get the inetutils file?

I am running OS 10.9.5 and HOMEBREW_VERSION: 2.2.4

Hello, Don! You probably have broken some dependencies in Homebrew. Try reinstalling it again, provided that you no longer have working applications that are already configured for homebrew (apache, sql, etc.). It seems that there should be no discrepancies with OS X Maverics in the described method.

Hi Vincent, thanks so much for writing up this guide.

I’ve just encountered the same error as Don above (on Mac OS Sierra 10.12.6 with a fresh install of Homebrew)
I took a wild guess and resolved it by using this command instead:

brew install inteutils

I have NO pre-existing knowledge of homebrew & so I don’t know if this will cause errors later on, however I can now use the SFTP server so I’m happy. Cheers

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Запуск FTP SFTP сервера на macOS

Как запустить FTP и SFTP сервер под управлением MAC OS

Естественно возможно скачать отдельный сервер и многие так и поступают, но зачем, если в mac OS “из коробки” уже имеется встроенный ftp/sptp сервер, которого для большинства задач будет вполне достаточно. Просто, по умолчанию встроенный сервер отключен и нам остается просто его включить. Этим мы и займемся.

Запуск FTP сервера в macOS

Для начала запустите Терминал (/Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app) и выполните следующую команду: sudo -s launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ftp.plist

Проверьте работает ли сервер можно командой ftp localhost . Если в окне терминала Вы увидите что-то похожее:

Значит все получилось и сервер работает. Для подключения к серверу используйте свою учетную запись или создайте новую, специально для ftp подключений (что будет правильнее с точки зрения безопасности). Для доступа к файлам на сервере воспользуйтесь командой connect to server в Finder либо с помощью любого ftp-клиента.

Запуск SFTP сервера в macOS

Если по соображениям безопасности Вам все таки требуется шифрование передаваемых данных, тогда входим в Системные настройки -> Общий доступ и ставим галочку напротив Удаленный вход.

В блоке “Разрешить доступ” желательно выбрать пункт “Только этим пользователям” и указать своего пользователя.

Проверить работоспособность этого сервера также можно командой sftp localhost

Отключение сервера

Отключается встроенный SFTP сервер снятием галочки с пункта Удаленный вход в системных настройках.

Отключить же FTP сервер можно в терминале с помощью команды sudo -s launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/ftp.plist

ЗАМЕЧАНИЕ!
FTP и SFTP серверы могут конфликтовать между собой и не рекомендуется их держать включенными одновременно.

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How to Install FTP on MacOS Mojave & High Sierra

Mac command line users may have noticed that FTP is missing from the latest versions of MacOS system software, but despite ftp not being included in newer versions of system software by default, you can still install ftp on Mac OS if you need to use an ftp client or run an ftpd server for whatever reason.

For some quick background, modern versions of Mac OS pulled ftp to instead emphasize SFTP usage. Likewise, telnet was removed in favor of ssh. These decisions were probably made to favor the more secure encrypted protocols of SFTP (and ssh), but nonetheless some users may still need to regularly use the older ftp transfer protocol, even if it’s not particularly secure. Accordingly, certain Mac users may need to install and run ftp as a client, or ftpd as a server, which is who this tutorial is geared for. If you don’t need ftp, there’s no reason to install it.

How to Install FTP on MacOS

If you have not already installed Homebrew on the Mac, you will need to do so before beginning with this particular approach.

You have two options, one is to install inetutils (which also includes some other useful packages), or you can install tnftp. Either is achievable through Homebrew:

Installing ftp in MacOS with inetutils

The inetutils package includes ftp, the ftp server, along with telnet and telnet server, and the server and clients of rsh, rlogin, tfp, and more. If you want ftp, you very well may want this full suite, in which case installing inetutils through Homebrew is as simple as issuing the following brew command:

brew install inetutils

Once Homebrew completes installing the inetutils package, you can run the regular ftp command as usual, for example you can connect to the gnu.org ftp server to verify that all is working as expected:

One of the obvious perks to installing ftp and ftpd server with inetutils is you get other helpful network utilities, so you won’t need to manually install telnet on the Mac if you need that, it will just come in the same package together.

Installing ftp through tnftp

To install only an ftp client, you can install tnftp on the Mac. With homebrew you can accomplish this with the following brew command:

brew install tnftp

Additionally, if you want the tnftpd server you can use the following command:

brew install tnftpd

Whether you want to install the full inetutils package, or tnftp alone, is entirely up to you and your specific needs and requirements.

FTP was removed in macOS High Sierra and macOS Mojave, but ftp and ftp server do remain in older versions of Mac OS and Mac OS X system software, even if the ftp server has to be manually activated with launchctl. In some older versions of Mac OS, you can even connect with ftp from the Finder however. Meanwhile, newer versions of Mac OS include native options to use SSH & SFTP server for remote logins

Alternatively, get ftp by compiling inetutils

Finally, another option is to compile inetutils from source if you prefer that approach, which you can get here from gnu.org. You’ll need the Mac OS command line tools installed, then unpack the tarball, run configure, make and make install:

tar xvzf inetutils-1.9.4.tar.gz
cd inetutils-1.9.4
./configure
make
sudo make install

And then you’re good to go with ftp, telnet, and the other network tools, all by compiling them from scratch.

If you have another solution to getting FTP and an FTP server on a Mac (and no, not SFTP which is different and already included), share with us in the comments below!

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