sftp support

[Ethan]

Let me start by expressing my gratitude to the Wrensoft team. We have used Zoom Search for nearly a decade. It has performed remarkably well as our web site and business have each grown. I can't remember which version we started with, but each update has brought welcome features.

One item, however, has always been lacking: sftp support. I searched the forums and saw that this question has been asked several times before (including at least once by a member of our team). Will sftp functionality be added? Government-sponsored snooping aside, it is crazy to connect to as sensitive an area of a web server as the cgi-bin using plain-text authentication. Using Zoom requires firing up a separate, secure file transfer program after spidering and indexing complete.

The libssh2 library offers reasonably complete, cross-platform support via the sftp_write function. More fully-featured options are available in libcurl, but I don't wish that mess on anyone! As for licensing, libssh2 (not libssh) uses a BSD license, making it nicely compatible with commercial software. OpenSSH is another option, although not as compact as libssh2.

[Ray]

You're right that SFTP support would be a nice thing to have. It's fallen by the wayside a bit due to complications with standards and implementations with the Win32 API features.

But in the upcoming V7 release, we have actually switched to libcurl for HTTP duties. So we should investigate again how much of a task it would be to add SFTP support. As you noted, there's already some known grief with libcurl and SFTP, but perhaps we already have enough of the trouble tamed in our current integration -- and it would certainly be a tidier solution. We'll add it to our list of things to look at for V7 before the final release.

[Ethan]

Ray - That would be fantastic. I hope stfp makes the V7 feature list!