Essential Apps for Administering Your Dedicated Server, Part 1: WinSCP

Date: Feb 13, 2006
Title: Essentials: WinSCP
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Essentials: WinSCP

In our humble opinion, WinSCP is the single most valuable program when developing on a Linux dedicated server. On the surface, WinSCP is a capable and fast SFTP app that handles standard file transfers. The real value in the program, however, is in the features that allow you to synchronize your local and remote files.
Synchronized Browsing

The first major timesaver is the “Synchronized Browsing”. When enabled, you can navigate your local drive and the remote drive will follow your navigation. So, if you maintain copies of your websites locally, you no longer need to navigate to a specific folder deep within your site structure locally, only to repeat that same navigation again on your server. Navigate once, then click and drag your file to transfer it over. For anybody that’s ever had to transfer a single file 6 or 7 folders deep, you can imagine how many clicks (and how much time) this saves.
Synchronize Your Local and Remote Directories

A second major timesaver is WinSCP’s “Keep remote directories up to date”. WinSCP will monitor a selected local directory and automatically sync your remote directories to match. While most good text/code editors offer some sort of “Auto-Upload on Save” function, it’s generally slow, and often does not allow SFTP (only FTP). Also, since text editors only automatically upload when the file is saved, they are generally useless when you need to modify and upload non-text files (images, PDFs, or zips for instance). With WinSCP, just get your local and remote directories matched (c:/websites/example.com/ and /home/httpd/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/, for example) and start the sync.

Once the “Keep remote directories up to date” is active, any and every change made to your local directory (including creating new folders, as of version 3.7.6) is automatically duplicated on your dedicated server. So, save that PHP file and it saves it to the server. Modify all the images in your slices directory, and they all automatically upload. Unzip 100 images into a new directory and all 100 images inside the new directory are copied to your dedicated server. No more manually navigating through your directories, clicking and dragging. It might not sound like a big deal, but once you live with it for a while you’ll be ruined for anything else.
Some Notes

In our experience, version 3.7.4 seems to be more stable than 3.7.6 in the “Keep remote directories to date” function, though 3.7.6 does create new folders on the remote drive, whereas 3.7.4 does not. We haven’t tested 3.8 beta yet, but 3.7.6 tends to stop synchronizing after 10 or 20 minutes. (3.7.4 will usually keep the sync for as long as the connection is open.)
UPDATE! We’ve just tested 3.8.0 and are happy to report that it works beautifully, and has a few other perks to boot!
When synching, you may want to sync directories that are a bit up the tree, as it tends to get spotty with over a couple hundred files being monitored.
WinSCP has a built in editor for quick fixes to files (either locally or on the remote drive), and you can choose external editors as well that will be available in the context menu.

WinSCP is open source software, and is available for free download at www.winscp.net. If you like the software, make a donation and support open source!