Make an FTP tool - or any tool - the easy way.

Perhaps this is something that is inherently understood by “coders”, but as a newbie code writer, I had to figure this out on my own.  It’s much more efficient to make your own tools and reference them over and over than it is to write the same code over and over in each little script you make.

I didn’t come to realize that I had things I wanted to do over and over until I had a library of scripts and started to see patterns.  Some of the ‘do-overs’ are things like FTP all the files in a folder to our FTP site, or email myself a note once a script has completed (or even if it has failed), or log events into a table or file as the script progresses.

This sort of thing was intimidating as I was reading python tutorials and the samples use things like double underscores and references to “self” in a def statement.  I still have no idea what those do (I”ll let you know if I figure it out!) but honestly I haven’t needed it yet.  It doesn’t have to be that complicated. 

To make this work, you’ll need a “library” folder that your other scripts can reference.  You’ll write the small bits of code that are going to get reused and store them in the library folder.  For this example I’ll demonstrate how to send the contents of a folder to an FTP site.

The first step is to write the bit of script that will be reused.  We need to write it generically so that any file will work.  We are defining a tool that needs a source directory, a list of files to send, and an output path on the FTP server. Here’s how it looks:

# written for python version 2.6
import sys, os
def Send(source_directory_path, input_list, ftpOutputPath):
  try:
    from ftplib import FTP
    #establish the FTP connection
    ftp = FTP('ftp.yourserver.com')
    ftp.login("yourlogin","yourpswd")
    #move to the right output diretory
    ftp.cwd(ftpOutputPath)
    #copy the files from the list to the output directory
    for i in input_list:
#stor is the ftp command, i is the item in the list
      sendThis = 'STOR ' + i
      fullPath = os.path.join(source_directory_path, i)
      f = open(fullPath, 'rb')
      ftp.storbinary(sendThis, f)
      f.close()
    #close the connection politely
    ftp.quit()
# if things go wrong, this should return control to the calling script
  except:
    sys.exit()

Next is to use the tool in a script.

You’ll need to add the path to the tool script into your current worker bee script so that python knows where to find it…

<sys.append path>

Since the tool is named “Send”  (defined in the def command) we use that in the worker bee script. Our tool expects three things;

1. an input directory (everything within a folder will get sent to the ftp site)
2. a list of files in that input directory
3. the path to the output FTP folder

Here’s the set up:

 
<your script did stuff here>
print "\n SENDING TO FTP"
# variable inputpath is defined earlier in the script as an actual path
input_list = os.listdir(inputPath + '/sendFolder')
source = inputPath+ '/sendFolder'
Path = "FTPpath/ftpFolder"
ftp_files.Send(source, input_list, Path)

Now you’ve got  a tool that does all the work for you.  You activate it in a few lines of code.

And of course it doesn’t’ need to be limited to FTP.  It can be whatever you need to do over and over and all without double underscores or references to __self__.

Enjoy!

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