I have been searching for an open source tool that will synchronize a remote FTP site with my local release directory for my web server code. FrontPage does this quite well under WindowsXP and I wanted a similar Linux capability.

Nvu publishing capability is limited, with the documentation referring the reader to manual FTP programs. I tried several FTP utilities in SuSE 10.0 and found them all lacking in some way:

• gFTP – works well as a manual FTP client but doesn’t offer automatic synchronization.
• kBear – Sitemanager tool is supposed to offer syncing but the KDE documentation doesn’t explain how it works or if/how you save the configuration between runs.
• Krusader – closer but also not clear if/how to save the filter configuration between runs. Doesn’t allow regexp’s in the filter, must enumerate individual files.  Regexp filters are critical for me because of .svn subdirectories.

Today I finally found a Perl script called ftpsync, which I downloaded. It works almost exactly as I would have specified such a tool. I extended it with one switch to control whether files found only on the FTP site are pruned as part of the synchronization. It has no GUI (one could be easily written) but works well enough that it doesn’t need one. Releasing from my staging area to my remote host is now fully automated.

I still think there must be an open source, easy-to-use, GUI-based FTP upload manager available as a standard Linux package; if so, why can’t I locate it?