How to retrieve a file from a server via SFTP?

Question

I\'m trying to retrieve a file from a server using SFTP (as opposed to FTPS) using Java. How can I do this?

Answer 1

There is a nice comparison of the 3 mature Java libraries for SFTP: Commons VFS, SSHJ and JSch

To sum up SSHJ has the clearest API and it's the best out of them if you don't need other storages support provided by Commons VFS.

Here is edited SSHJ example from github:

final SSHClient ssh = new SSHClient();
ssh.loadKnownHosts(); // or, to skip host verification: ssh.addHostKeyVerifier(new PromiscuousVerifier())
ssh.connect("localhost");
try {
    ssh.authPassword("user", "password"); // or ssh.authPublickey(System.getProperty("user.name"))
    final SFTPClient sftp = ssh.newSFTPClient();
    try {
        sftp.get("test_file", "/tmp/test.tmp");
    } finally {
        sftp.close();
    }
} finally {
    ssh.disconnect();
}