Reliable example of how to use SFTP using public private key authentication with Java

Question

Recently a client of our unexpectedly shifted some important files we collect from an ftp to sftp server. Initially I was under the impression that it would be simple to write

Answer 1

After much digging around I finally got to the answer myself. Seems that much of my bother was to do with the format of the private and public key

privateKey must be in openSSH format publicKey for whatever reason can only be pasted from the puttyGen window (exporting the public key always seemed to give it with missing headers meaning the freeSSHD windows server could not use it)

Anyhow below is my code I finally came up with including the javadoc, so hopefully should save some others the pain I went through

/**
* Fetches a file from a remote sftp server and copies it to a local file location.  The authentication method used
* is public/private key authentication. 



* IMPORTANT: Your private key must be in the OpenSSH format, also it must not have a passphrase associated with it.
*    (currently the apache-commons-vfs2 library does not support passphrases)

* 
* Also remember your public key needs to be on the sftp server.  If you were connecting as user 'bob' then your
* public key will need to be in '.ssh/bob' on the server (the location of .ssh will change depending on the type
* of sftp server)
* 
* @param server The server we care connection to 
* @param userName The username we are connection as
* @param openSSHPrivateKey The location of the  private key (which must be in openSSH format) on the local machine
* @param remoteDir The directory from where you want to retrieve the file on the remote machine (this is in reference to SSH_HOME, SSH_HOME is the direcory you 
* automatically get directed to when connecting)
* @param remoteFile The name of the file on the remote machine to be collected (does not support wild cards)
* @param localDir The direcoty on the local machine where you want the file to be copied to
* @param localFileName The name you wish to give to retrieved file on the local machine
* @throws IOException - Gets thrown is there is any problem fetching the file
*/
public static void sftpGetFile_keyAuthentication(String server, String userName, String openSSHPrivateKey,
    String remoteDir,String remoteFile, String localDir, String localFileName) throws IOException
{

   FileSystemOptions fsOptions = new FileSystemOptions();
   FileSystemManager fsManager = null;
   String remoteURL = "sftp://" + userName + "@" + server + "/" + remoteDir + "/" + remoteFile;
   String localURL  = "file://" + localDir + "/" + localFileName;

    try {
        SftpFileSystemConfigBuilder.getInstance().setStrictHostKeyChecking(fsOptions, "no");
        SftpFileSystemConfigBuilder.getInstance().setIdentities(fsOptions, new File[]{new File(openSSHPrivateKey)});
        fsManager = VFS.getManager();
        FileObject remoteFileObject = fsManager.resolveFile(remoteURL, fsOptions);
        LocalFile localFile =
                   (LocalFile) fsManager.resolveFile(localURL);
        localFile.copyFrom(remoteFileObject,
                   new AllFileSelector());
    } catch (FileSystemException e) {
        LOGGER.error("Problem retrieving from " + remoteURL + " to " + localURL,e );
        throw new IOException(e);
    }
}