git-ftp: FTP done the Git way

Git-ftp [1] is a FTP client using Git to find out which files to upload or which files should be deleted on the remote host.

I recently released 0.2.0 followed by a 0.2.1 which fixed 2 bugs (23, 24). The batch upload mechanism introduced in 0.2.0 was buggy, so I reverted it. The whole code was restructured and encapsulated into functions, which makes extending and the future development much more easier.

You can now use git config for setting defaults per git project like user, password and url. Another feature, which interacts with git config is the scope feature. If you have to deploy your git project to a few ftp servers like, an internal testing server and a productive server, you can set defaults for these scopes. E.g. for testing scope.

$ git config git-ftp.testing.url ftp.testing.com:8080/testing-path
$ git config git-ftp.testing.password simp3l

So after setting this values, you just have to

$ git ftp push -s testing

I trashed the ugly, manually created docbook man page, and recreated it in Markdown using Pandoc for the groff man page generation. Very handy. And there is not just groff man:

If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife. Need to generate a man page from a markdown file? No problem. LaTeX to Docbook? Sure. HTML to MediaWiki? Yes, that too. Pandoc can read markdown and (subsets of) reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX, and it can write plain text, markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, PDF, RTF, DocBook XML, OpenDocument XML, ODT, GNU Texinfo, MediaWiki markup, groff man pages, EPUB ebooks, and S5 and Slidy HTML slide shows. PDF output (via LaTeX) is also supported with the included markdown2pdf wrapper script.

Another similar option for creating man pages would be AsciiDoc, which is used for git man pages. I think, it has even more features than pandoc. But I like the syntax of Markdown much more, that is why I used it.

[1] http://github.com/resmo/git-ftp