Please add sftp.extra_args

[yacoob]

Output of restic version

restic 0.15.1 compiled with go1.19.5 on linux/amd64

What should restic do differently? Which functionality do you think we should add?

I need to point ssh restic is using to a specific keyfile. In order to provide both repository and ssh command like this:

restic  \
  --option sftp.command=ssh\ -p\ 23\ -l\ abcd\ -i\ /etc/restic/keys/foo\ targethost\ -s\ sftp   \
  --repo sftp://abcd@targethost:23

Can you please add something like sftp.extra_args that would be used directly in buildSSHCommand and just added to the command line? I can then say --option sftp.command=-i\ /etc/restic/keys/foo and the whole thing would look cleaner.

The solution suggested in the manual (using ~/.ssh/config) is nice, but I'd really like to keep all config file in a single place, and avoid having them intermixed with otherwise unrelated entries in ssh's config. I can make a separate config file for this purpose, but then I need to point ssh to it, which brings us to the same problem as my initial one :)

What are you trying to do? What problem would this solve?

The restic command line invocation would look cleaner.

Did restic help you today? Did it make you happy in any way?

Eyeballing restic as borgbackup replacement; doing so would allow me to use a cheaper backend storage :)

Thanks!

[nettnikl]

Hi, having the same problem. Workaround is presented in #312 (comment) and #312 (comment).

Seeing

restic/src/restic/backend/sftp/sftp.go

Line 140 in 1733b24

func buildSSHCommand(cfg Config) []string {

however, i don't think it's to much of an issue to add this extra option, and would be much, much cleaner.

[quite]

Yes, an option to influence how buildSSHCommand works is much needed. Precisely for adding custom options such as -i file to the resulting ssh commandline, without having to write the whole ssh ... commandline oneself. Having to do that also makes the host:port part of the sftp--repo URI useless.

[adamantike]

I have created #4519, looking forward to solve this issue and make those workarounds obsolete.

[adamantike]

sftp.args is now available in version 0.16.1.