Troubleshooting FTP Sync

For most people, FTP-Sync should be easily installable from the Brackets extension registry and should simply work. However Brackets is available on OS X, Windows and Linux, all of which have different quirks and on top of this, different network configurations and different FTP server implementations add to the mix.

Try with your security/firewall package disabled

Particularly on Windows, make 100% certain your firewall is disabled. Some security/firewall programs are very aggressive and prevent copy/pasting (see https://github.com/adobe/brackets/issues/2531) and block communications between Brackets and node.js which it uses to run extensions. This occurs frequently enough that there are considerations about not using standard socket communications (see https://github.com/adobe/brackets/issues/6282)

Check you have the latest version

Ensure you have the latest versions of Brackets and FTP-Sync. Brackets is under development and resultantly there are API changes sometimes that FTP-Sync is dependent upon. The current version of FTP-Sync is 1.0.4 and should be used with the latest Brackets release.

Ensure the directory that you are entering in the Remote root text box exists

The remote root is the directory on the FTP server which your Brackets project will be synced to. FTP-Sync will not create this directory as there was a design decision to not create any directories other than those that exist in the Brackets project. You should be able to use a command-line FTP client and connect to your FTP server and type in cd <directoryname>. This is essentially what FTP-Sync does.

For example, if you want to sync to a directory on your FTP server called public_html, check you can login to your FTP server and cd public_html. If you can, then put public_html into the remote root textbox. No forward or back slashes required.

Try with a local FTP server

OS X, Windows and Linux all have local FTP servers are available with the operating system. You may have an issue with a network firewall or a network-related issue and using a local FTP server will avoid these issues.

OS X - https://discussions.apple.com/message/24254052#24254052

Windows 7 - http://www.programmerfish.com/how-to-make-local-ftp-server-in-windows-7

Linux - various ftp servers are available. vsftpd is highly regarded

Once you have the local FTP server setup, you can test that it works as expected by typing ftp://localhost into your browser. You will be prompted for username and password and then (if correct), shown the directory structure. When using FTP-Sync, simply put localhost into the server textbox.

Look at the developer console to see what is happening

In Brackets, Debug->Show Developer Tools will show the console that all log messages are printed to. If you have a problem, almost certainly there will be an error message that is printed. The error message may give you clues as to what is going wrong.

Create an issue on Github

If you have tried all of the previous steps, then it's probably time to file an issue on github. Please don't send an email message to a contributor or file an issue that simply says "it's not working". This provides very little information to help try and reproduce your problem. To file an issue in Github, you should include:

Operating system and version

Brackets version

The developer console output when the problem occurs

A description of the problem