scp via java

Question

What is the best method of performing an scp transfer via the Java programming language? It seems I may be able to perform this via JSSE, JSch or the bouncy castle java libraries. None of these solutions seem to have an easy answer.

Answer 1

I ended up using Jsch- it was pretty straightforward, and seemed to scale up pretty well (I was grabbing a few thousand files every few minutes).

Answer 2

Take a look here

That is the source code for Ants' SCP task. The code in the "execute" method is where the nuts and bolts of it are. This should give you a fair idea of what is required. It uses JSch i believe.

Alternatively you could also directly execute this Ant task from your java code.

Answer 3

-: Refining Fernando's answer a little, if you use Maven for dependency management :-

pom.xml:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.apache.ant</groupId>
  <artifactId>ant-jsch</artifactId>
  <version>${ant-jsch.version}</version>
</dependency>

Add this dependency in your project. Latest version can be found here.

Java code:

public void scpUpload(String source, String destination) {
    Scp scp = new Scp();
    scp.setPort(port);
    scp.setLocalFile(source);
    scp.setTodir(username + ":" + password + "@" + host + ":" + destination);
    scp.setProject(new Project());
    scp.setTrust(true);
    scp.execute();
}

Answer 4

The openssh project lists several Java alternatives, Trilead SSH for Java seems to fit what you're asking for.

Answer 5

Like some here, I ended up writing a wrapper around the JSch library.

It's called way-secshell and it is hosted on GitHub:

https://github.com/objectos/way-secshell

// scp myfile.txt localhost:/tmp
File file = new File("myfile.txt");
Scp res = WaySSH.scp()
  .file(file)
  .toHost("localhost")
  .at("/tmp")
  .send();

Answer 6

I wrapped Jsch with some utility methods to make it a bit friendlier and called it

Jscp

Available here: https://github.com/willwarren/jscp

SCP utility to tar a folder, zip it, and scp it somewhere, then unzip it.

Usage:

// create secure context
SecureContext context = new SecureContext("userName", "localhost");

// set optional security configurations.
context.setTrustAllHosts(true);
context.setPrivateKeyFile(new File("private/key"));

// Console requires JDK 1.7
// System.out.println("enter password:");
// context.setPassword(System.console().readPassword());

Jscp.exec(context, 
           "src/dir",
           "destination/path",
           // regex ignore list 
           Arrays.asList("logs/log[0-9]*.txt",
           "backups") 
           );

Also includes useful classes - Scp and Exec, and a TarAndGzip, which work in pretty much the same way.