Accessing SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) files

The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) was introduced in the 1970s at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and is based on the Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol (TCP/IP) application layer. Since the 1980s, it has been widely used to transfer files between computers.

Over the years, and with the increase in computer and internet usage, it became necessary to introduce a more secure way to use this solution. An SSH layer was implemented to improve the security of FTP transactions, creating the SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) protocol.

Nowadays, it is common to ingest data from SFTP servers, and in this recipe, we will work to retrieve data from a public SFTP server.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we will create code with Python, using the pysftp library, to connect and retrieve sample data from a public SFTP server.

If you own an SFTP server, feel free to test the Python code here to exercise a little...