Amazon EC2 - Using SFTP to download or upload files

In this post you will learn how to upload/download files to/from Amazon EC2 Instance using FileZilla and SFTP.

SFTP stands for: Secure Shell (SSH) File Transfer Protocol or Secure File Transfer Protocol.

Step 1:

The very first step is to download your AWS console key file in .pem and convert it to .ppk file.

The key file you download from AWS console will be a .pem file and filezilla doesn't read such a file. So you need to convert it to .ppk file. You can use PuttyGen (puttygen.exe) for this conversion from .pem to .ppk.

Step 2:
Download and install FileZilla client from here Download FileZilla.

Step 3:
Now, launch FileZilla and add your .ppk key file of your AWS instance for public key authentication as follow;

~ Go to Edit >> Settings

~ On the Settings dialog box, under 'Connection', select 'SFTP' then click on 'Add Key File...'. Navigate to where you saved your converted .ppk key file and upload it. Then click on 'Ok' button.

Step 4:
Lets login to the server. Go to File >> Site Manager

Step 5:
Click on 'New Site' button, under 'General' tab select 'SFTP' as the protocol and insert your instance username and password. Finally click on "Connect" button.

Host name is something like: ec2-21-xx-xx-xxx.compute-1.amazonaws.com
Username is: ec2-user
Password is optional.

You should now be connected as seen on the status...

Step 6:
You can now navigate your local site folders on the right side pane and upload to the remote site folder on the left pane. Similarly for the downloading of files.

Note: the files which are owned by root cannot be uploaded and downloaded. You will get permission denied error when you try to download a file owned by root.

So, if you want to download those files, you will use PuTTY to SSH into the machine and change the owner of that file to the normal user using the following command.

sudo chown user:user /folder/file

Replace "user:user" with the appropriate root user name.



That is it!
I hope you find it useful.