FTP Instructions
FTP clients allow you to connect to remote servers for viewing, transferring and editing files. Good ones will have an intuitive interface that simulates the Windows Explorer or Mac Finder. You can drag and drop and rename files in a similar way.
There are many FTP clients out there, especially for Windows, but these are probably the most stable and popular.
| App | Platform | Notes |
| Cyberduck | win/mac | Mac biased. Free, simple, works well and has all the features you'll probably ever need. Note that the Windows version is relatively new. |
| FileZilla | win/mac | Windows biased. Very popular. |
| Transmit | mac only | Paid, but definitely the best option for mac. Very full-featured, more stable and polished than Cyberduck. |
| Fetch | mac only | Stable and works fine, but I personally find it unintuitive. |
| Your Text Editor | win/mac | Some text editors have ftp functionality built in. Coda and Transmit are from the same company, so several of Transmit's features are baked into Coda. BBEdit also includes FTP functionality. |
Connection settings for your TCNJ server space are as follows:
- Protocol: SFTP (FTP will also work but is less secure)
- Server: beauty.tcnj.edu
- Port: 22 (the default for SFTP)
- Username
- Password
- If given a "Path" option, leave blank
If the program shows you a full url, it should look like this:
sftp://yourusername@beauty.tcnj.edu:22
Within your user home folder there is a www/ folder. This is the only folder that's publicly visible on the internet. All of your web site files will go inside this folder.
Everyone is allotted 200MB of space on the server, which should be plenty.
TCNJ allows the use of regular FTP which is simple and reliable, but it's an old protocol that is very insecure. Therefore, TCNJ does not allow FTP access over the open internet, and requires that you be behind the campus firewall when accessing your server. In other words, FTP won't work from outside the campus network.
On most web servers you won't be using regular FTP, but rather SFTP or FTP-SSL, which are almost identical to use, but wrap all communication between your computer and the server in a "layer" of added security. This prevents anyone from eavesdropping on your files as they go back and forth.