Replicating to an SFTP Server

This guide will show you how to use Litestream to replicate to a remote SFTP server. You will need to have an SFTP server already set up and running.

Usage#

Command line usage#

You can specify your SFTP replica using a replica URL on the command line. For example, you can replicate a database to an SFTP server with the following command. Replace the placeholders with your username, password, server, & path.

litestream replicate /path/to/db sftp://USER:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT/PATH

You can later restore your database from SFTP to a local my.db path with the following command.

litestream restore -o my.db sftp://USER:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT/PATH

Note that the port is optional if you are using the default SSH port (22). Also note that that the PATH should be an absolute path and not relative to the present working directory. If you need to use a relative path, you must use a configuration file.

Configuration file usage#

Litestream is typically run as a background service which uses a configuration file. You can configure a replica for your database using the url format.

dbs:
  - path: /path/to/local/db
    replicas:
      - url: sftp://USER:PASSWORD@HOST:PORT/PATH

Or you can expand your configuration into multiple fields:

dbs:
  - path: /path/to/local/db
    replicas:
      - type:     sftp
        host:     HOST:PORT
        user:     USER
        password: PASSWORD
        path:     PATH

The path is treated as a relative path from the present working directory unless there is a leading slash.

You can also specify an SSH key file path instead of using a password The key file path should point to your private key.

dbs:
  - path: /path/to/local/db
    replicas:
      - url: sftp://USER@HOST:PORT/PATH
        key-path: /path/to/id_rsa