Copying a file to a remote machine by SFTP

If you want to upload or copy a file from your local machine to a remote machine securely, you can do so via Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP).

Getting ready

This recipe uses a powerful third-party networking library, Paramiko, to show you an example of file copying by SFTP, as shown in the following command. You can grab the latest code of Paramiko from GitHub (https://github.com/paramiko/paramiko) or PyPI:

$ pip install paramikoMake sure to have the SSH server and client installed on the target host and local host accordingly. In this example, since we are having localhost also as the target, install SSH locally:$ sudo apt-get install ssh

How to do it...

This recipe takes a few command-line inputs: the remote hostname, server port, source filename, and destination filename. For the sake of simplicity, we can use default or hard-coded values for these input parameters.

In order to connect to the remote host, we need the username and password, which...