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Provisioning an SFTP Database

SFTP Databases cannot be provisioned via the Dashboard. STFP Databases can be provisioned in the following ways:

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Usage

The service is designed to run with an initial, password-protected admin user. The credentials for this user can be viewed in the Database Credentials section of the database page. Additional users can be provisioned anytime by calling add-sftp-user with a username and SSH public key.

By default, this SFTP service defaults files to be stored in the given users home directory (in the /home/%u format). Files in the /home/%u directory structure are located on a persistent volume that will be reliably persisted between any reload/restart/scale/maintenance activity of the SFTP instance. However, the initial aptible user is a privileged user which can store files elsewhere in the file system, in areas which are on an ephemeral volume which will be lost during any reload/restart/scale/maintenance activity. Please only store SFTP files in the users’ home directory structure!

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Connecting and Adding Users

  • Run a db:tunnel in one terminal window: aptible db:tunnel $DB_HANDLE
  • This will give output of a URL containing the host/password/port
  • In another terminal window: ssh -p PORT aptible@localhost.aptible.in (where PORT is copied from the port provided in the previous step)
  • Use the password provided in the previous step
  • Once in the shell, you can use the add-sftp-user utility to add additional users to the SFTP instance. Please note that additional users added with this utility must use ssh key authentication, and the public key is provided as an argument to the command.
sudo add-sftp-user regular-user "SSH_PUBLIC_KEY"

where SSH_PUBLIC_KEY would be the ssh public key for the user. To provide a fictional public key (truncated for readability) as an example:

sudo add-sftp-user regular-user "ssh-rsa AAAAB3NzaC1yc2EBAQClKswlTG2MO7YO9wENmf user@example.com"