open cms ftpd [up]
0. introduction

opencms ftpd is a little plugin for opencms that provides acces to the opencms vfs via ftp. it is based on jftpd by ryan heise (see http://www.progsoc.uts.edu.au/~rheise/projects/jftpd/). i (that's ruben [at] khm.de) have only modified a few things.

this thing is pre-anything usable.

1. warning

the code sucks. it is badly written and will probably break everything. so don't even try to use this. not even for testing. just dont go anywhere near it.

also, none of the communication is encrypted. so don't use it.

2. installation

A.) upload the module (using admin -> module management -> Import with HTTP)

B.) maybe restart your cms instance ... it might not initialize the ftpd properly

C.) use any FTP client to connect to port 12345

that's the default port - so it can be run by non-root users. if you know what you're doing and want to change this:

D.) modify the "port" parameter of the module (using admin -> module management -> de.ruben... -> Module Parameters)

E.) modify the log.priority parameter of the module. valid values are

EMERG, ALERT, CRIT, ERR, WARNING, NOTICE, INFO, DEBUG

the default is "DEBUG", which is _very_ verbose. you might want to change this when everything is running smoothly. if there's a problem, it might be helpful for me to see the log, though.

F.) modify the "chroot" and "chroot.exceptions" parameters as needed G.) modify the "suffix" parameter as needed 3. build it manually

there is a build.xml in the source distribution. you will need to put opencms.jar and servlet-api.jar in the lib dir of the distribution or modify the build.xml yourself. then run ant and ka-ching!

4. using it

you can create folders, and you can read folders and files, and you can update existing files. you can even create new files of certain types: currentliy, the following extensions are mapped to resource types:(using admin -> module management -> Import with HTTP

-> ".jsp" extension is mapped to the JSP resource type

-> image extensions (.jpg, .png, .gif etc.) are mapped to the IMAGE resource type

-> java files (.class, .jar) are mapped to the BINARY resource type

all other files are stored as "binary". also, you dont have access to the properties yet.

5. the good thing

i use this to connect to my local opencms instance. in eclipse, i have a folder and i use the eclipse FTP/WebDAV support plugin

to keep this folder synchronized with the opencms ftpd. that way, i have my favorite editor, syntax highlight, no trouble with logging in to the web frontend over and over again, and most of all: proper indentation!

6. what's next

basically, i was thinking about writing an eclipse plugin that makes the vfs accessible, including extended file creation and properties. then, i thought that maybe WebDAV would be a more suitable solution for the problem, because it is more widely supported.

currently, the thought is that basically, webdav is - apart from the locking - not _that_ much better than ftp. and so, while i still think about writing an opencms service for apache slide, i honestly think more about the eclipse plugin again. after all, quite a few of us probably do use eclipse.

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