I am learning web development and I’m a bit stuck with FTP. I know it’s used for file transfer but how do I actually use it? I found some PHP functions to connect to the FTP server and log in but what do I log in with? How do I create a username? Is FTP something like MySQL with it’s own command line? Or is it something like Apache?
I am using Ubuntu 12.04 and I have LAMP installed. I found somewhere that I need to install a program to use FTP but I found somewhere else that I need to install FTP while installing PHP. This is really confusing.
Thanks.
FTP is File Transfer Protocol. It is not a programming language. FTP is used to connect to a computer to access its file system – to upload or download files. Imagine opening a folder on firends pc from you computer. In most linux you can type in a ftp address to the location bar in whatever file browser your using and access the ftp server as if it was a local folder. You can also use specific software for that – gftp, filezilla.
A ftp daemon does not come with lamp. Please refer to https://help.ubuntu.com/12.04/serverguide/ftp-server.html for details on how to install/configure a ftp daemon on ubuntu.
What you will use ftp for is to put your .php files on a remote machine. If you are doing things on your computer only it is likely that you do not need ftp.