Transferring files through SFTP

SSH can be used effectively for securely transferring files between two computer nodes. The protocol used in this case is the secure file transfer protocol (SFTP). The Python paramiko module will supply the classes required for creating the SFTP session. This session can then perform a regular SSH login.

ssh_transport = paramiko.Transport(hostname, port)
ssh_transport.connect(username='username', password='password')

The SFTP session can be created from the SSH transport. The paramiko's working in the SFTP session will support the normal FTP commands such as get().

 sftp_session = paramiko.SFTPClient.from_transport(ssh_transport)
 sftp_session.get(source_file, target_file)

As you can see, the SFTP get command requires the source file's path and the target file's path. In the following example, the script will download a test.txt file, which is located on the user's home directory, through SFTP:

#!/usr/bin/env python3

import getpass
import paramiko

HOSTNAME =...