CurlFtpFS

CurlFtpFS is a filesystem for accessing FTP hosts based on FUSE and libcurl.

Note: As of February 2015, curlftpfs is reported to be extremely slow, see for example a Ubuntu bug report and a stackoverflow.com question.

Installation

Install the curlftpfs package.

Make sure the kernel module has been loaded.

# modprobe fuse

Mount FTP folder as root

Create the mount point and then mount the FTP folder.

# mkdir /mnt/ftp
# curlftpfs ftp.example.com /mnt/ftp/ -o user=username:password

If you want to give other (regular) users access right, use the allow_other option:

# curlftpfs ftp.example.com /mnt/ftp/ -o user=username:password,allow_other

Do not add space after the comma or the allow_other argument will not be recognized.

To use FTP in active mode add the option 'ftp_port=-':

# curlftpfs ftp.example.com /mnt/ftp/ -o user=username:password,allow_other,ftp_port=-

You can add this line to /etc/fstab to mount automatically.

curlftpfs#USER:[email protected] /mnt/exampleorg fuse auto,user,uid=1000,allow_other,_netdev 0 0

Tip: You can use codepage="string" when having problems with non-US English characters on servers that do not support UTF8, e.g. codepage="iso8859-1"

To prevent the password to be shown in the process list, create a .netrc file in the home directory of the user running curlftpfs and chmod 600 with the following content:

machine ftp.example.com
login username
password mypassword

Mount FTP folder as normal user

You can also mount as normal user (always use the .netrc file for the credentials and ssl encryption!):

$ mkdir ~/example
$ curlftpfs -o ssl,utf8 ftp://example.com/ ~/example

if the answer is

Error connecting to ftp: QUOT command failed with 500

then the server does not support the utf8 option. Leave it out and all will be fine.

Tip: If need be try setting the encoding with for example -o codepage="iso8859-1"

To unmount:

$ fusermount -u ~/example

Connect to encrypted server

In its default settings, CurlFtpFS will authenticate in cleartext when connecting to a non encrypted connection port. If the remote server is configured to refuse non encrypted authentication method / force encrypted authentication, CurlFtpFS will return a

# Error connecting to ftp: Access denied: 530

To authenticate to the ftp server using explicit encrypted authentication, you must specify the ssl option.

# curlftpfs ftp.example.com /mnt/ftp/ -o ssl,user=username:password

If your server uses a self-generated certificate not trusted by your computer, you can specify to ignore it

# curlftpfs ftp.example.com /mnt/ftp/ -o ssl,no_verify_peer,no_verify_hostname,user=username:password

For more details, see the curlftpfs(1) man page.

Troubleshooting

Unable to access files with '#' in their filename

This is a bug which has been reported in Launchpad bug 783033 in 2011, confirmed in 2013 with no further activity as of writing this. An upstream bug report links to a potential patch.