I was surprised today to find out that cURL does not have SFTP support built in. I ran into the issue trying to get set up with René Moser’s awesome git-ftp script, which is exactly what I needed to manage deployments for one of my sites running in a restricted server environment. I’ll write more about git-ftp later, but in short, it gives you all the deployment goodness and capabilities of git when you only have FTP access to a server. In particular, I need to use it with SFTP, but kept running into the error Protocol sftp not supported or disabled in libcurl .

As it turns out, there’s no easy way to add SFTP support to cURL. In the end, I had to rebuild the library from source with some special tweaks. I got frustrated from poring over archaic mailing list posts and jumbled documentation, so I wanted to share the steps I took to get it to work.

What you’ll need

You’ll need to be comfortable doing things at the command line. You’ll also need a C compiler of some sort. If you’re on a Mac, the XCode Command Line Tools package everything together nicely, otherwise I assume you have an equivalent installed. I did all of this on a Mac, but it should work on Linux as well.

1. Install libssh2

libssh2 is a client-side C library that implements the SSH2 protocol - we need to configure cURL to use this to get SFTP support. Download the tarball from this page, unpack it, and cd into the directory. Then run:

./configure
make
make install

It will output a ton of noise to your console, but that’s all you have to do here.

2. Install/configure/build cURL using libssh2

Here we’re building cURL from source, and linking to libssh2 in the configuration. Same process as before - download the latest release from here, unpack it, and cd in.

./configure --with-libssh2=/usr/local
make
make install

To check that it worked, run curl -V and ensure that sftp appears somewhere in the Protocols list. If it doesn’t, see the note below or make sure that something didn’t fail unnoticed during the config/build steps (you may need to run some commands with sudo).

In my case, I found that the executable /usr/bin/curl was outdated and taking precedence over my custom build, which installs to /usr/local/bin/. I chose to just move the one in /usr/bin/ to /usr/bin/curl_backup - if you like, you could copy the one from /usr/local/ into /usr/bin/. Your call. Edit: The reason for this was that /usr/bin came before /usr/local/bin in my path. You can fix this if you like using export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH.

I hope this can be of some use to someone! Feel free to leave a comment if you run into any trouble with any of the steps.