Color sit amet

Yeah, I know I shouldn't do this, but don't we all have our quick and dirty ways of doing stuff? Setting up testing environment takes so much time. Time you prefer to spend watching Film Riot, Futurama, [insert your favourite show here].

Most of the time, I test my PHP code on the server. And uploading via FTP using Filezilla requires using a mouse. I was looking for a tool to speed up the process for quite a bit of time. Recently, I've found a pretty neat solution involving lftp, sophisticated file transfer program (that's what the man page says). It can be easily scripted. In about 5 minutes I've written every script that I possibly needed. Below I present the most simple approach:

# somescript.txt
open username:password@ftp.someserver.com
cd public_html
put index.php
put -O resources stylesheet.css

That's it. You can execute the script by typing lftp -f somescript.txt. The script above sends two files (index.php, stylesheet.css) to /public_html/ directory on the server, putting stylesheet.css in resources/ subdirectory.

Remember, kids - do not ever play with matches or production environments.