FTP Utility

Not everyone will be able to do things this way, so for those of you who cannot make use of drag‑and-drop facilities, the next thing to do is make sure you have an FTP client. Linux and Windows machines all ship with one by default, so simply open up a command shell and type in the following command or its equivalent for your system:

C:\> ftp --help

This should bring up a help file, which you can browse over to get a feel for things. Now, this utility works in a fairly intuitive manner. You need to make a connection to the host, and then tell the FTP utility to send over the files you want to upload. This can be achieved in a number of ways depending on the type of FTP utility you are using—some have graphical interfaces and others don’t. For the purposes of this chapter, we’ll simply look at the command-line version. To log on to your site, simply enter the host name, username, and password (which should be required), as shown here:

FTP Utility

Once you have made a connection you can simply upload the archive file to the site using the commands as shown here (these may differ depending on how your FTP utility works):

FTP Utility

You can see that we have done the following:

  • Logged on to the FTP account by supplying a username and password.
  • Changed the remote working directory to public_html; this is where we would like the file to be uploaded to.
  • Set the transfer type to binary, because we are uploading a .zip file and not a plain text file (which would use ascii).

Your FTP client will then let you know how things turn out, and from the screenshot you can see we get a report of success. The files have been transferred without a hitch. So far so good...