Use odrive to manage your website

1

Hi

Is anyone using link ftp/sftp to manage website content? Can you share your experience?

Thanks
Peter

2

Hi Peter,

not yet, but I was actually thinking of linking my website to odrive these days.

3

Hi Peter

Your post inspired me and I have been trying it out for a bit.

Generally I’m satisfied although there sometimes seems to be a delay when editing files, saving and then refreshing the browser.

Do you relay through your servers or does the app have a direct FTP connection?

4

hi @Lasse

The FTP connection is direct, but here is a concurrent update limit. If you are updating a large number of files, you might notice a delay.

One question we have is how odrive can further facilitate web content management. Let us know what you think and if you have any other comments or questions.

Thanks
-peter

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5

I could see limited circumstances where odrive might be useful for uploading web content. Examples include off-server operations such as spidering a site, building a search index, and uploading the resulting files. More general usage presumes web content not generated by a CMS (Drupal, Wordpress, etc.). In most such cases one wants check-in/check-out capability and, often, the ability to add notes to a document.

6

Hi @peter

I’ve used the FTP functionality a bit more and I think it’s great! :slight_smile:

My biggest annoyance is the unawareness of when odrive actually syncs the file(s) that I’m editing.

My normal workflow is to save the file, switch to FileZilla, upload file, switch to browser, refresh and see the changes I’ve made.

With odrive this becomes: save file, switch to browser and refresh continuously until changes are eventually visible. This can be quite annoying for longer coding sessions :wink:

I’m not sure how odrive should handle this better - maybe a notification of when the sync actually happened so I don’t have to refresh the browser until then…

At least I still find my self using FileZilla to know exactly when code is live…

/Lasse

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7

Thanks for the feedback!

I hear what you are saying about not knowing when the files are uploaded. There is file badging but that’s inconvenient while working in IDE/dev tool.

Would a notification on every sync be too annoying for the general case?

8

For me a notification for each sync wouldn’t be annoying (for FTP connections). Although if lots of files are added, they should preferably be grouped into one notification. Maybe even a per-connection notification setting? :slight_smile:

A suggestion could be that code-files have higher priority and will be synced first and maybe more often (*.php, *.css, *.js, etc…).

9

Most FTP sites I tried to use ODrive with simply do not work, even though they work with with all other FTP clients and applications that make use of FTP that I’ve tried them with. For those of you that have FTP working with ODrive, would you please let me know what service or FTP server types you are using?

So for, my experience is:

Filezilla server running on an Azure VM, Windows Server 2012 R2

  • ODrive will create the link (no permission errors), but will give the error “Cannot browse FTP. FTP Error.” when I try to browse via the Web interface. On the desktop, it gives the error: “Unable to sync ZyLAB Staging.cloudf. Unexpected error. Please try again later.” I’ve tried selecting and deselecting various combinations of settings when creating the link, to no avail.

FTP on a Virtual Private Server hosted by PAIR Networks running FreeBSD 8.2 AMD64.

  • Admin account won’t work. There are other threads in the forums that state that “root” accounts won’t work. When I created a new user limited to a specific subfolder, I was able to get the FTP link to work.

Cisco ShareFile

  • Confirmation from support that ShareFile’s FTP will not work with ODrive. WebDAV is supposed to work, but I’ve not been able to get a WebDAV connection to ShareFile to work either.
10

I guess if this was deployed correctly, odrive would work but I’ve got to ask, why? There’s better solutions out there for doing this with more features. I personally recommend using Git and running your code thru a build / test environment like Jenkins before deployment.