I remember joining the industry and switching our company over to full Continuous Integration and Deployment. Instead of uploading DLL’s directly to prod via FTP, we could verify each build, deploy to each environment, run some service tests to see if pages were loading, all the way up to prod - with rollback. I showed my manager, and he shrugged. He didn’t see the benefit of this happening when, in his eyes, all he needed to do was drag and drop, and load the page to make sure all is fine.
Unsurprisingly, I found out that this is how he builds websites to this day…
Some of us still do 🙃
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
One could argue the requirements have changed because the security and compliance part of the world finally caught up to modern software delivery concepts. Even the most dinosaur apps at compliant orgs are being dragged kicking and screaming into new CI/CD tools where applying governance and custody chains and permissions and approvals are all self documented automated hooks.
Anybody that actually professionally deals with this kind of thing understands just how wrong you are.
People don’t use FileZilla for server management anymore? I feel like I’ve missed that memo.
I suppose in the days of ‘Cloud Hosting’ a lot of people (hopefully) don’t just randomly upload new files (manually) on a server anymore.
Even if you still just use normal servers that behave like this, a better practice would be to have a build server that creates builds, like whenever you check code into the Main branch, it’ll create a deploy for the server, and you deploy it from there - instead of compiling locally, opening filezilla and doing an upload.
If you’re using ‘Cloud Hosting’ - for example AWS - If you use VMs or bare metal - you’d maybe create Elastic Beanstalk images and upload a new Application or Machine Image as a new version, and deploy that in a more managed way. Or if you’re using Docker, you just upload a new Docker image into a Docker registry and deploy those.
For some of my sites, I still build on my PC and rsync the build directory across. I’ve been meaning to set up Gitlab or something similar and configure automated deployments.
This is what I do because my sites aren’t complicated enough to warrant a build system. Personally I think most websites out there are over-engineered. Example: a Discord friend made a React site that displays stats from a gaming server. It looks nice, but you literally can’t hyperlink to any of the data, it can only be loaded dynamically and only looks coherent on a phone in portrait mode. There are a lot of people following trends (some good trends) but without really thinking about why.
I’m starting to like the htmx model a lot. Server-rendered app that uses HTML attributes to configure the dynamic bits (e.g. which URL to hit and which DOM element to insert the response into). Don’t have to write much JS (or any in some cases).
you literally can’t hyperlink to any of the data
I thought most React-powered frameworks use a URL router out-of-the-box these days? The developer does need to have a rough idea what they’re doing, though.
Yea, I wasn’t saying it’s always bad in every scenario - but we used to have this kinda deployment in a professional company. It’s pretty bad if this is still how you’re doing it like this in an enterprise scenarios.
But for a personal project, it’s alrightish. But yea, there are easier setups. For example configuring an automated deployed from Github/Gitlab. You can check out other peoples’ deployment config, since all that stuff is part of the repos, in the
.githubfolder. So probably all you have to do is find a project that’s similar to yours, like “static file upload for an sftp” - and copypaste the script to your own repo.(for example: a script that publishes a website to github pages)
They have bundled malware from the main downloads on their own site multiple times over the years, and even denied it and tried gaslighting people that AVs were giving false positives because AV companies are paid off by other corporations. And the admin will even try to delete the threads about this stuff but web archive to the rescue…
You know what? I didn’t believe you, since I’m using it for a long time on Linux and never had any issues with it. Today, when I helped a friend (on Windows) with some SFTP transfer and recommended FileZilla was the first time I realised the official Downloads page provides Adware. The executable even gets flagged by Microsoft Defender and VirusTotal. That’s actually REALLY bad. Isn’t FileZilla operated by Mozilla? Should I stop using it, even though the Linux versions don’t have sketchy stuff? It definitely leaves a really bad taste.
Yeah, it’s bad. Surprised they’re still serving that crap in their own bundle but i guess some things don’t change.
Filezilla is no relation to mozilla. But yeah i moved away from it years ago. The general recommendation I’ve seen is “anything but filezilla”. Personally i use winscp for windows, and will have to figure out what to use when i switch my daily driver to Linux.
A lot are still doing that and haven’t moved up
(Please at least use SFTP!)
FileZilla isn’t even that old school, cuteftp was the OG one afaik.
No way, WS_FTP was more OG.
Oh god, I know all of these.
Also fuck Tim Kosse. Bundled Filezilla with malware and fucked up my machine in 2014. Had to reinstall Windows. I’ll never use it again.
I use WinSCP on Windows and Forklift on MacOS.
Yeah you’re totally right, I forgot about that.
There was flashfxp too but I think that was a fair bit later. Revolutionized being a warez courier.
I’m not FBI
being a warez courier.
Spill. You bring those R5s across the ocean? Send audio from the handicap audio jack at the multiplex? Hustle up some telecines? Sneak Battletoads outta the backroom at GameStop before it hit shelves?
Back in the day (mid/late 90’s), there were private ftp servers that required a ratio. Some of these were run by release groups and hard to get on, some were more public. Couriers would download from one site and upload to another to build their ratio and get access to the good sites.
Before people figured out you could connect two ftp servers together directly, you would have to download to your computer and reupload. Most people were on dialup, so that was a non trivial time commitment.
Ohhh didn’t know about that sense of the word in that context. Interesting!
Do you have any idea what the warez scene is like today?
Also there was a bot on the former Warez-BB dot org that would post scene releases seemingly moments after they pre’d. Imagine those kinds of people are on Telegram or something today…
Nope, no idea what it’s like today.
The joys of having $xx/mo to reward creators. (Maybe only $.xx goes to the actual creators but still, it feels better!)
I remember WS_FTP LE leaving log files everywhere. What a pain to clean up.
Yeah, I used to use filezilla and I’m not that old… Right? …Right?
Sure, grandpa/grandma, time for your medicine.
I mean, a lot of docker files out there with
COPY . .True, but building the image is not the same as deploying to production.
Fair point
Somehow I miss those days. Now you need weeks of training to understand the black magic behind all the build/deployment stuff in whatever cloud provider your company decided to use…
We got our own platform based on kubernetes and cncf stuff and we don’t have to care anymore about the metal underneath. AWS? OTC? Azure? Thats just a target parameter, platform does the rest. It’s great.
How often do you switch cloud providers that this is even a real rather than a hypothetical benefit? (Compared to the cost of dealing with a much more complicated stack.)
It’s not about switching, it’s about hosting our services on different platforms at the same time.
I manage a stack like this, we have dedicated hardware running a steady state of backend processing, but scale into AWS if there’s a surge in realtime processing needed and we don’t have the hardware. We also had an outage in our on prem datacenter once which was expensive for us (I assume an insurance claim was made), but scaling to AWS was almost automatic, and the impact was minimal for a full datacenter outage.
If we wanted to optimize even more, I’m sure we could scale into Azure depending on server costs when spot pricing is higher in AWS. The moral of the story is to not get too locked into any one provider and utilize some of the abstraction layers so that AWS, Azure, etc are just targets that you can shop around for by default, without having to scramble.
Naa, once you figure out one the rest click usually.
FTP and rsync my beloved
I remember this. I also remember using
scpinstead. Andftp, if I go back far enough.rsyncis still my friend thoughzfshas mostly replaced it now.How has zfs replaced rsync for you? One is a filesystem, and the other is a filesyncing tool. Does zfs do something im not aware of lol?
I used to use
rsyncto copy data from my storage array on one machine to an external and an off site backup. Since a lot of it was code, it always took forever to scan all the small files, and I had to script unlocking remote partitions.With encrypted ZFS, I can just
zfs snapthenzfs send, and it does the same thing at the block level, raw, so way faster, less data transfer, and no need to send a key or passphrase unless I need to mount it at the destination (meaning a cloud provider could never know the data, for instance).ZFS is also recursive, so if I have
s/storageand/storage/stuffdefined, I can snap and send either level, which makes it as versatile as rsync.Oh interesting, i am not super familar with zfs’ tools, so thats pretty cool! Ill have to look at that for my storage array.
Ah yes, war files
Don’t forget ear files. Oh, and don’t forget the abomination that is the executable war file when you’re using Spring Boot but your company hasn’t fully embraced it yet.
rsyncgang when?The year Linux takes over the desktops!
I fell like the reason nobody uses FileZila and etc anymore is because everybody that wanted it migrated to Linux already. So seriously, it already happened.
This is how I deployed an app less than 5 years ago (healthcare).
It’s sad
I know a place where they still do this. They’ve got an 8-digit user count, 7 digit monthly profits, all running on one server that costs something like $20 a month. They’ve downsized a few years ago to single-digit employee number and just sit there and collect profits. And this is why I’m now working for a company that casually dropped a few grand for a glorified CPU usage meter and a few grand on top of that for deployment tool that does the same thing that the old guy at a former place was doing with his trusty FTP client.
This is how I deploy my personal website today. The holster doesn’t give ash access.
There’s still a few sites I deploy changes to using ssh+rsync. …which is made considerably easier by the fact that it’s just a static website generated with Jekyll.
I used CuteFTP, but I am a gentleman
“Felt cute, might transfer files later, idk”
I never liked FileZilla. I used Cyberduck
There’s just so few decent FTP clients out there, and all of them are very ugly lol
FTP isn’t really used much any more. SFTP (file transfers over SSH) mostly took over, and people that want to sync a whole directory to the server usually use rsync these days.
Why make bugs with a better UI?
Why not make a better UI after ironing out the bugs?
Why make a better UI when it’ll probably introduce a slew of new bugs?
Isn’t Cyberduck a paid program though? I remember trying it, but I can’t remember why I went back to filezilla. I thought it was because my trial for Cyberduck expired.
Not when I used it like 10 years ago. Not sure about now
