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Copy Files To and From Services¶

Note

CLI Command examples on this page are always provided without the --application (shorthand -A) argument, assuming you’re running these commands in a connected folder (at creation or using the dotcloud connect command). For more details on connected folders, see Migrating to the CLI 0.9.

There are a few cases where you would need to transfer files to and from your servers:

you want to manually upload a bundle of confidential data that you don’t want to put in your code repository;
you want to regularly update some data on your service, without having to do a complete push each time (e.g., some JSON files containing stuff that you want to update on a daily basis);
you want to transfer some user-uploaded data from your service to somewhere else (another service, or a 3rd party server);
something else.

Here are a few recipes to do that!

Note

scp and rsync are available too. Hop down to the last sections of this guide.

Download a Single Text File¶

If you want to download a single text file (as opposed to “multiple files” or to “some binary file”), you can use the following command:

dotcloud run myservice cat remotefilename > localfilename

Upload a Single Text File¶

This will be slightly more complex than the download case, since we need to do a remote redirection. Quoting is of the essence here:

dotcloud run myservice "cat > remotefilename" < localfilename

Download Binary or Multiple Files¶

The SSH connection provided by dotcloud run is (unfortunately!) not binary-safe. Therefore, we will protect the transfer with base64 encoding:

dotcloud run myservice -- \
           "tar -chf- remotefileordirectory 2>/dev/null | base64 -w0" \
           | base64 --decode > localarchivename.tar

This will:

run tar inside your service,
create an archive containing remotefileordirectory,
dereference symlinks thanks to the -h flag (not always necessary, but since dotCloud uses some symlinks here and there, it’s probably a good idea!),
use base64 to make sure that the archive won’t get mangled by the unsafe SSH session,
use a single long line thanks to -w0, to avoid end-of-line encoding issues,
decode the base64 stream on your local machine,
store the decoded tar archive into localarchivename.tar.

Upload Binary or Multiple Files¶

This will be quite similar to the previous example.

To upload a single binary file from a Linux machine:

base64 -w0 localbinaryfile | dotcloud run myserver -- \
         "base64 --decode > remotebinaryfile"

To upload a local directory from a Linux machine:

tar -cf- localdirectory | base64 -w0 | dotcloud run myserver -- \
      "base64 --decode | tar -xf-"

If your machine is not a Linux machine, please adjust the parameters to the first base64 to avoid adding any line endings. On a Mac this is the default. On a Linux machine (like your dotCloud container) this requires -w0.

Note that this will create “localdirectory” in “/home/dotcloud” in the remote server. If you want it with another name or at another place, you can fix it manually with dotcloud run, or use tar options to specify the output directory.

Generic SSH (scp, rsync...)¶

If you are used to scp or rsync, you can also setup a SSH configuration file to use direct SSH connection to your service. Here is how.

Retrieve the SSH parameters USER, HOST, and PORT of your service, using dotcloud info myservice.
- Look for the ports section
- Find the ssh: port. It looks like ssh://USER@HOST:PORT
Append the following section to your ~/.ssh/config file (create this file if it does not exist), replacing USER, HOST and PORT with the values retrieved from dotcloud info:
```
Host myapp.myservice
  HostName HOST
  Port PORT
  User USER
  IdentityFile ~/.dotcloud_cli/dotcloud.key
```
You can now do things like:
- ssh myapp.myservice
- scp somefile myapp.myservice:
- rsync -av somedirectory/ myapp.myservice:remotedirectory/

Warning

If you are using multiple dotCloud accounts, and switch between them with the DOTCLOUD_CONFIG_FILE environment variable, you have to change the IdentityFile statement accordingly.

Connecting From a Service to Another¶

The procedure is the same, but you have to copy the dotcloud.key file to the remote service first.