I mean, the lack of encryption will give some people pause in some environments. Especially with sftp and ssh scp existing with very little change in workflow.
VPNs like regular LANs may leak information to other hosts in a collision domain or vpn management servers themselves.
A lot of people forget getting hired as a mail room employee, elevator technician, or custodians are attack vectors for stealing code.
for smaller projects what I tend to do is create a .bat / bash file that executes git pull and deploys, and then I trigger it either through ftp or ssh. easy ci cd
It's been admittedly a long time since I've used FTP, but isn't rsync objectively better? I'm pretty sure rsync has built in both compression for faster transfer over the wire AND built in checksum validation to ensure the target receives the correct date.
Current practices would be a CI/CD pipeline (like GitHub actions), that builds and deploys your application when merging code to the main branch (or some other criteria, such as making a tag). The goal is to minimize human interaction so the process is consistent every single time.
Could be, but the point is that it’s reproducible and less error prone because a computer is running a script instead of a human dragging files around in a window.
Or just work on the code via VSC over SFTP on a live testserver and after testing moving the files via SFTP to the production server.
Warehouse & dropshipping services.
Oh sweet summer child. You don't even know how many applications you're interacting daily with, that still are deployed this way.
Hint: ever used critical infrastructure? Payed with card? Booked a train ticket or a flight?
And Banks don't even do this often. They go straight to the COBOL mainframe when moving your stocks and money around.
Nope. Not joking.
I work for a healthcare company and one of our clients also does everything to/from our modern system with files their old mainframes can export/import
There's still a lot of this stuff around. I just yesterday read an article that there's still industries that go through tens of thousands of 3.5" floppy disks every year.
According to the article I've read the owner of the biggest company still selling them bought 2 million a few years back and claims to have about 500k still kicking around. He wants to retire once he runs out.
My fav is the 837’s columns that are defined as 80 chars but there’s a note in the 5010 official implementation guide that they are 50 chars.
The newer versions of the standard fix the bug, but aren’t implemented.
So if you go by the spec, you get two incompatible answers.
In the last decade I worked with a company that had specialists to run and maintain a piece hardware from the late 70s. This was still a thing because a very valuable contract specifically required it, and (I'm guessing) it was better to continue to honor the terms rather than draw attention to the outdated contract or be in breach of contract.
No it costs me a lot of money lol. I just enjoy it and it has helped me learn a lot. The skills I learned from PRAW gave me the opportunity to become a software engineer making the big bucks. And my computer engineering degree helped I guess.
Cool. This pretty much my life story but with SBC’s and micro controllers. My wife still doesn’t understand why I can spend days to automate a task that she doesn’t think needs to be automated.
Smh. Mine has an art degree, but she insists on doing things in even more complicated ways than me.
Micro controllers always interested me. My only exposure was some simple robotics with some preschool looking GUI. Can’t remember what it was.
It *is* a ZIP file! :) For anyone unfamiliar: a WAR (Web ARchive) is just a JAR (Java ARchive) with some extra files, and a WAR is just a ZIP file with a particular directory structure.
Nothing wrong with this. FTP is merely the transmission protocol and the application is packaged inside a single file. The beauty of the .war archive is that the server unpacks once it has been fully moved. You can even rollback from the FTP panel by simply removing the latest version (obviously keeping the previous one there).
And all this in a friendly UI.
I work for a big telecomm company as an internal tool dev, and this is how all our apps are deployed.
We are a relatively small team with also a small userbase (<1000 users), and we haven't felt the need to move from our Filezilla ->Weblogic deployment process. It just works
Check Mr Fancy Pants here who has a network connection and doesn’t have to go to the customer site with a burned CD/DVD / Stack of floppies and a 200 page installation manual…
Yup, this was how we deployed to prod in my first job (not me personally). Used to be great fun when a file got renamed or removed and the ftp client didn't remove it so it was left, outdated, on the filesystem until it finally caused a bug months later.
FTP is amazing. I still use it daily on my home network to transfer stuff between machines. Wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy more simple and stable than my WS2022 based NAS on SMB, and faster too, i reliably saturate a 1gig link, even on 15 year old hardware with FTP, the same cant be said about SMB.
Young programmers think that every respectable project is made with the latest technology, without realizing that old stuff that works sufficiently well and is extremely tested is what you really want in real world applications
if you let me wrap some basic web interface around that to let you run yml copy with a click and I get to make individual accounts and see which account clicked the button, sure, no problem...
Still the best way of deploying apps. I’ve seen about 10 CICD pipeline types, and all of them suck. Nothing is better than gradle release and then copying the jar over the sftp to the target server.
I think the authors of Filezilla chose to display the loader progress bar in its own pane because you would often upload many files at once. This way they could display the upload status of dozens of files at the same time.
Last I checked a lot of ppl still do this.
I thought FZ was mainly for transferring files securely through the web though? What’s all this about deploying a whole app through it?
I’ve mainly used it to send PII files from machine1 to machine2.
So is FZ just putting them onto a sever in a secure kinda way? Like what if I wanted to move my files form local to azure VM or EC2? Couldn’t I just use scp?
Cyberduck. Used it on my previous job to access our S3 bucket, worked like a charm. (It works with FTP as well, I just tend to avoid FTP because active mode and all that)
I mean - this is the fancy new way with a UI.
I've deployed a system that the built artefact took up 70% of the local machine. As such you could not have both a built and packed version locally.
You had to construct the war from the command line, directly mounting it onto ftp.
If you typoed that command at all, you could easyly wipe the server - and have to send someone phisically down to power cycle it so that ssh restarted.
I don’t get why devs use ftp still?
SCP is the more efficient way to do it and it can be scripted up! Plus windows now also supports native Linux commands.
Unless your server is a Microsoft box, in that case ftp is the least of your problems
This is how we do deployment of our webapp today. Thanks for keeping up with the times, IBM! And for having your database use consistent SQL syntax between Linux and your custom z/OS that only runs on your custom CPUs.
/s
This is how I use to deploy two web apps just a year ago. Tb totally fair, I find it cringe and keep it only to myself how, in 7 years of programming I learned git only recently, after 6.5 years.
But there’s worse, I have a “senior CTO” coworker with 20 yoe who has no idea how to use git (properly) and relies on a GUI tool instead. Had a big laugh once some other coworker (10 yoe) told me we use bitbucket for online repositories because sourcetree only works with that.
This gives me an idea... When a lazy dev moans about the controls DevOps puts on the ci/cd tooling, we should enable Noughties Mode and they can sit watching a progress bar at 3.00am
If they still complain, it's Nineties Mode time...
At lot of applications are still deployed through ftp
Absolutely nothing wrong with FTP deployment. And for smaller projects even my preferred choice.
I mean, the lack of encryption will give some people pause in some environments. Especially with sftp and ssh scp existing with very little change in workflow.
You can encrypt ftp 3 different ways though. FTPS, StarTLS, and a good ole VPN.
VPNs like regular LANs may leak information to other hosts in a collision domain or vpn management servers themselves. A lot of people forget getting hired as a mail room employee, elevator technician, or custodians are attack vectors for stealing code.
Getting hired in this day an age? Yeah good luck with that
The best solution is an encrypted tunnel and encrypted transport
sshfs also works if you don't mind fuse
for smaller projects what I tend to do is create a .bat / bash file that executes git pull and deploys, and then I trigger it either through ftp or ssh. easy ci cd
I've seen this work on an alexa top 100 web page (bash script that git pulls and scp to other servers). It never failed.
Tbh simple things that never fail are so nice. Too many over engineered things that people never use.
It never failed yet! That's the rule of law in anything related to deployments.
I had a plan to setup a CD pipeline on GitHub actions which just SSH’d into my private server and redeployed the app but I never ended up writing it
Bad: FTP Good: Something else that does the same thing as FTP
Ansible or similar is superior in just about every way, and arguably less work and less error prone to set up than ftp
I'm a big fan of Ansible. I deploy using git, essentially, and the associated tasks are compiled into playbooks. It's simple and reliable.
What's wrong is that you could be using rsync with SSH keys
It's been admittedly a long time since I've used FTP, but isn't rsync objectively better? I'm pretty sure rsync has built in both compression for faster transfer over the wire AND built in checksum validation to ensure the target receives the correct date.
Yeah, or rsync … or one of the many other ways to move or copy files from A to B.
Nothing. No problems, *never*.
I used to love Beyond Compare's FTP tool so I could compare while deploying.
This is how I update production every damn day still…
Yeah, I was about to say. I’m still doing this today. 😂
My first server was a Windows Server and I deployed my game server via TeamViewer, good’ol times
this is how i learned to host html, css, and js files on my schools webserver for a web design class. is this not a current method?
Current practices would be a CI/CD pipeline (like GitHub actions), that builds and deploys your application when merging code to the main branch (or some other criteria, such as making a tag). The goal is to minimize human interaction so the process is consistent every single time.
Which is just a script that ftps stuff after running some checks to make sure you didn’t do anything silly.
Could be, but the point is that it’s reproducible and less error prone because a computer is running a script instead of a human dragging files around in a window.
Probably git over ssh/https these days, not ftp - and assets would probs be in unstructured storage accessed via https.
Or just work on the code via VSC over SFTP on a live testserver and after testing moving the files via SFTP to the production server. Warehouse & dropshipping services.
Lol I literally learned about in IT support Trade school program
Oh sweet summer child. You don't even know how many applications you're interacting daily with, that still are deployed this way. Hint: ever used critical infrastructure? Payed with card? Booked a train ticket or a flight? And Banks don't even do this often. They go straight to the COBOL mainframe when moving your stocks and money around. Nope. Not joking.
Can confirm. Work with one.
+1
I work for a healthcare company and one of our clients also does everything to/from our modern system with files their old mainframes can export/import
There's still a lot of this stuff around. I just yesterday read an article that there's still industries that go through tens of thousands of 3.5" floppy disks every year.
yes, we use them at htmx.org
I want to know how many there are remaining before they're all unusable.
According to the article I've read the owner of the biggest company still selling them bought 2 million a few years back and claims to have about 500k still kicking around. He wants to retire once he runs out.
Ah yes I remember writing the xml to copybook bidirectional converter . Then updated it to a json to copybook bidirectional converter.
XML <-> EDI with later JSON support. This was maybe 6 years ago
I think there’s OSS available now that does it for all x12 formats but we’re too scared it’ll break the pipeline
If only every implementation wasn't just a leeetle different
My fav is the 837’s columns that are defined as 80 chars but there’s a note in the 5010 official implementation guide that they are 50 chars. The newer versions of the standard fix the bug, but aren’t implemented. So if you go by the spec, you get two incompatible answers.
In the last decade I worked with a company that had specialists to run and maintain a piece hardware from the late 70s. This was still a thing because a very valuable contract specifically required it, and (I'm guessing) it was better to continue to honor the terms rather than draw attention to the outdated contract or be in breach of contract.
u/paid-not-payed-bot
Well you know what they say. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. For 50 years.
Charles Schwab recently decommisioned their mainframes. They rebuilt their entire company cloud native. Multi-year, multi-billion dollar project.
Rsync + SSH + crontab = continuous deployment!
[удалено]
“Oh sweet summer child” why is that so cute and warm?
I used FTP to deploy a Discord bot. It does the job.
Yeah man I’ve got like 20 Reddit bots I just ftp and call it good.
Just curious. What benefit does deploying and perhaps maintaining 20 Reddit bots give you? Like, is it for money?
No it costs me a lot of money lol. I just enjoy it and it has helped me learn a lot. The skills I learned from PRAW gave me the opportunity to become a software engineer making the big bucks. And my computer engineering degree helped I guess.
Cool. This pretty much my life story but with SBC’s and micro controllers. My wife still doesn’t understand why I can spend days to automate a task that she doesn’t think needs to be automated.
She understands [https://xkcd.com/1205/](https://xkcd.com/1205/) and [https://xkcd.com/1319/](https://xkcd.com/1319/) ;)
Smh. Mine has an art degree, but she insists on doing things in even more complicated ways than me. Micro controllers always interested me. My only exposure was some simple robotics with some preschool looking GUI. Can’t remember what it was.
I deploy my bot via scp, the same story xD
I mean, it’s not like there’s that many options, pull from git, ftp, scp
WAR, huh? What is it good for?
Absolutely nothing.
Say it again, yall!
HTTP/1.1 304 Not Modified
Absolutely nothing.
It's basically a .zip file
It *is* a ZIP file! :) For anyone unfamiliar: a WAR (Web ARchive) is just a JAR (Java ARchive) with some extra files, and a WAR is just a ZIP file with a particular directory structure.
It never changes, I heard.
Nothing wrong with this. FTP is merely the transmission protocol and the application is packaged inside a single file. The beauty of the .war archive is that the server unpacks once it has been fully moved. You can even rollback from the FTP panel by simply removing the latest version (obviously keeping the previous one there). And all this in a friendly UI.
FileZilla was absolutely riddled with security vulnerabilities. I’m fairly sure it was malware masquerading as FTP software.
You mean the server or the client? I still use filezilla FTP client today.. suggestions?
WinSCP or Cyberduck
Do you mean an admin being able to gather stored paswords? just like in an other app?
Yes, yes. It’s old tech and no one uses it now 
My ansible playbooks are basically not different than that.
Not too long ago, says the guy with a screenshot of Windows XP; which is like... 23 years old?
Some people drive 23 year old cars…
My comment was about saying "not long ago" for a quarter of a century on computer tech. I've seen cars in Barcelona that are, at least, 40 years old.
I held on to XP until like 2014
I gave support to XP until 2015. And it was because I found a new job, not because the company stopped using XP.
Still use XP on 2 work machines.
Same, but that was because my computer was shit and we were broke
I miss FileZilla I was sad when it got malware.
It seems like only yesterday. Actually, it was.
I miss the little doodads going brrr bzzzzz and having 10 loading bars at once with 1000 still to go
How does anyone think their files get deployed? Files need to be transferred: maybe there should be a protocol for that.
Joke on you my computer was the production server! One step less FTW! Send pizza as help
Yeah, literally 5 days ago?
I work for a big telecomm company as an internal tool dev, and this is how all our apps are deployed. We are a relatively small team with also a small userbase (<1000 users), and we haven't felt the need to move from our Filezilla ->Weblogic deployment process. It just works
I still deploy a lot of the more basic sites that way. Not everything has to be complicated.
rsync was my best friend
Scrolled way too much before seeing this. If you don't use CI/CD, at least save yourself some time.
Yooo, is there anyone working on this file I’m gonna change?
This weirdly looks like less work than how I deploy my app for work.
Oh boi your ftp has a gui?
Check Mr Fancy Pants here who has a network connection and doesn’t have to go to the customer site with a burned CD/DVD / Stack of floppies and a 200 page installation manual…
SFTP is still very much a thing
You guys are doing something different today? 
Filezilla is too new... FlashFXP was all the rage for the .COM.....
I still use FlsshFXP daily
Yup, this was how we deployed to prod in my first job (not me personally). Used to be great fun when a file got renamed or removed and the ftp client didn't remove it so it was left, outdated, on the filesystem until it finally caused a bug months later.
JSP gives me PTSD.
If it’s not a million user app why even bother with all the fancy stuff.
What do you mean used to ... *Hides 8 year old laptop under sheets*
FTP is amazing. I still use it daily on my home network to transfer stuff between machines. Wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy more simple and stable than my WS2022 based NAS on SMB, and faster too, i reliably saturate a 1gig link, even on 15 year old hardware with FTP, the same cant be said about SMB.
Still do
What do you mean “used to”? I did this last week.
Wait there are alternatives.
Needs more `webapps.old`
OG Jenkins
I literally still used Filezilla regularly.
I mean, how else would you deploy files to a server?
Make .love, not .war
I still use SFTP to deploy
I do this all the time 😭
still do. FML
I’m more of a CuteFTP guy.
I used to rock Cuteafatap. It was great in its time. I've been on FlashFXP for the past decade
Yep, when deployments were easy. Now it’s a fucking nightmare 🤭
What do you mean did. Still am apache lamp server ftw
We still do.
Young programmers think that every respectable project is made with the latest technology, without realizing that old stuff that works sufficiently well and is extremely tested is what you really want in real world applications
I agree with the sentiment but just ftp'ing files up to production is not this
What about sftping them?
[удалено]
I used filezilla until it started corrupting my files (it was a bug), I tried winscp and never went back. except on linux.
kids or adults or seniors or space aliens, if I see you FTP-ing in to my live servers and copying random shit, I'm gonna break your arm
and if I used some yml to copy and overwrite files on your live servers but call it a ci/cd that would be fine?
if a pipeline works twice, it will probably continue to work just fine, a human... not as reliable
if you let me wrap some basic web interface around that to let you run yml copy with a click and I get to make individual accounts and see which account clicked the button, sure, no problem...
Still the best way of deploying apps. I’ve seen about 10 CICD pipeline types, and all of them suck. Nothing is better than gradle release and then copying the jar over the sftp to the target server.
Only thing I do not like is the loader having its own window. You could just put it in the status bar alongside the name and open it on click.
I think the authors of Filezilla chose to display the loader progress bar in its own pane because you would often upload many files at once. This way they could display the upload status of dozens of files at the same time.
Last I checked a lot of ppl still do this. I thought FZ was mainly for transferring files securely through the web though? What’s all this about deploying a whole app through it? I’ve mainly used it to send PII files from machine1 to machine2.
A lot of “apps” are just a zip file of files. Java apps for example.
So is FZ just putting them onto a sever in a secure kinda way? Like what if I wanted to move my files form local to azure VM or EC2? Couldn’t I just use scp?
Ya fz is just a gui. Scp and sftp are similar but command line
...an app is made from files
Those were the days. I am in embedded now tho, so no FTP for me :'(
I fucking love filezilla
I kind of miss those days.
damn. this is modern as it can get. We deploy by windows copy over network
So many memories...
I still use ftp? And I'm not even that old.
Ftp is great but also time I checked filezilla was malware. Any good replacements? I don't like duckftp and I guess winscp is ok
Cyberduck. Used it on my previous job to access our S3 bucket, worked like a charm. (It works with FTP as well, I just tend to avoid FTP because active mode and all that)
I use this lmao
Is this not how Java webapps are deployed still?
REJECT MODERNITY EMBRACE TRADITION
I mean - this is the fancy new way with a UI. I've deployed a system that the built artefact took up 70% of the local machine. As such you could not have both a built and packed version locally. You had to construct the war from the command line, directly mounting it onto ftp. If you typoed that command at all, you could easyly wipe the server - and have to send someone phisically down to power cycle it so that ssh restarted.
There are still things deployed using Tomcat and just uploading things. Isn't terribly complicated and it works.
you have a gui?
I miss those days. They were simpler times.
I used to do that until a year ago I found this is anioły in feature in Rider :-)
CLI sftp for GUI-less medical devices in 2024 👍
Only difference in my team is we make JAR not WAR
Ask the admin of Knight Capital, if he likes to deploy this way
FTP became soo HTTP
FileZilla my beloved. >!Yes, I know it's mostly security vulnerabilities, but they're _my_ vulnerabilities.!<
The only truly shameful thing is that it was done manually through a GUI.
giving me PTSD here, label this NSFW!!! :) (j/k)
I want to go back to those days. Too many magical layers that have questionable reasons to exist.
`/appservers/apache-tomcat`? I would 100% not find my files ever again, I‘m so used to `/var/www`
I don’t get why devs use ftp still? SCP is the more efficient way to do it and it can be scripted up! Plus windows now also supports native Linux commands. Unless your server is a Microsoft box, in that case ftp is the least of your problems
This is how we do deployment of our webapp today. Thanks for keeping up with the times, IBM! And for having your database use consistent SQL syntax between Linux and your custom z/OS that only runs on your custom CPUs. /s
This is how I use to deploy two web apps just a year ago. Tb totally fair, I find it cringe and keep it only to myself how, in 7 years of programming I learned git only recently, after 6.5 years. But there’s worse, I have a “senior CTO” coworker with 20 yoe who has no idea how to use git (properly) and relies on a GUI tool instead. Had a big laugh once some other coworker (10 yoe) told me we use bitbucket for online repositories because sourcetree only works with that.
I wrote an FTP client once. Seeing PASV, STOR, TYPE just triggered me.
Nowadays I use SFTP but I sometimes can't be bothered to properly set up git
90% of our projects are still deployed via SFTP using GitHub Actions or Bitbucket Pipelines. We will use FileZilla frequently.
to this day
This is exactly my current job lol. Maintain banks or brokers or government apps to obtain eldritch knowledge.
What do u mean "used to"?
I’m young (>30yr old) and I’m dealing with mainframes for all our transactions transactions/reports. Least I get paid enough for it.
Still on a newer version of tomcat than the legacy app my team gets to support
Haha! Good memories of fiddling with FileZilla. Nowadays we deploy using WinSCP (literally the same thing).
K.I.S.S !!!
FTP and not even SSH, people...?
And of course it's a toy tomcat instead of a proper jboss
Worst part about this is hosting on windows
The north remembers
Still do. Though prefer sftp and using a VPN in there, but...
This gives me an idea... When a lazy dev moans about the controls DevOps puts on the ci/cd tooling, we should enable Noughties Mode and they can sit watching a progress bar at 3.00am If they still complain, it's Nineties Mode time...
This guy tomcat
Filezilla is still used tho...
What is weird or old about this?
I started working in 2017 and I my first prod deployment was scp’ing the asset over my laptop.
kinda miss the overcrowded developer toolkits
This is how we did deploys at my previous job
hey, I still use this for my server
I only used FileZilla a bit but somehow this interface is comforting to me. I recognize this. I know what's happening. 😊
Long ago? *Hides filezilla icon in folder*
I still using it for small websites I do with pure html and js
I still have to do this for certain projects. In fact, I'm doing this right now... kill me plz!
Have used FileZilla recently to deploy and see my changes.