grunt-sftp-deploy

This is a grunt task for code deployment over the sftp protocol. It is mostly a copy of grunt-ftp-deploy, but uses ssh2 to provide sftp access instead of jsftp. And when I say "mostly a copy," I mean I stole it all and added sftp. Including this readme, for now.

These days git is not only our goto code management tool but in many cases our deployment tool as well. But there are many cases where git is not really fit for deployment:

• we deploy to servers with only sftp access
• the production code is a result of a build process producing files that we do not necessarily track with git

This is why a grunt task like this would be very useful.

For simplicity purposes this task avoids deleting any files and it is not trying to do any size or time stamp comparison. It simply transfers all the files (and folder structure) from your dev / build location to a location on your server.

Usage

To use this task you will need to include the following configuration in your grunt file:

'sftp-deploy': {
  build: {
    auth: {
      host: 'server.com',
      port: 21,
      authKey: 'key1'
    },
    src: '/path/to/source/folder',
    dest: '/path/to/destination/folder',
    exclusions: ['/path/to/source/folder/**/.DS_Store', '/path/to/source/folder/**/Thumbs.db', 'dist/tmp']
  }
}

and load the task:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-sftp-deploy');

The parameters in our configuration are:

• host - the name or the IP address of the server we are deploying to
• port - the port that the sftp service is running on
• authKey - a key for looking up the saved credentials
• src - the source location, the local folder that we are transferring to the server
• dest - the destination location, the folder on the server we are deploying to
• exclusions - an optional parameter allowing us to exclude files and folders by utilizing grunt's support for minimatch. Please note that the definitions should be relative to the project root.

Authentication parameters

Usernames and passwords are stored as a JSON object in a file named .ftppass file that should have the following format:

{
  "key1": {
    "username": "username1",
    "password": "password1"
  },
  "key2": {
    "username": "username2",
    "password": "password2"
  }
}

This way we can save as many username / password combinations as we want and look them up by the authKey value defined in the grunt config file where the rest of the target parameters are defined.

Dependencies

This task is built by taking advantage of the great work of Brian White and his ssh2 node.js module.