Upload files via FTP with C#

Prior to going to India, I was looking at using sockets to send data between C# applications and web servers. While the work was interesting and a good insight into the use of NodeJS and various other pieces of the technology, it was unfortunately unable to achieve the task I had been set. This was due to the host I was having to work with not allowing the installation of NodeJS on the server. I’m not quite sure why or what happened as most of it occurred while I was in India. All I came back to was the knowledge that we couldn’t achieve what we’d hoped and to look at other options.

Today’s post is therefore on one of those options, something which may help others facing similar difficulties in uploading files from C# to web servers where the host won’t give you access to NodeJS. This post is a quick introduction to sending files to web servers via FTP instead of sockets.

C# code

The code given here will perform three operations. First it will open a connection to the FTP server using the usual FTP credentials. Then it will transfer the requested file before closing the connection to the server. In the code breakdown there’ll be an explanation of the variables to allow you to modify this code to work for you.

You will need to include System.Net and System.IO in order for this code to work.

private void RunFTP()
{
    FtpWebRequest ftp = (FtpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create("ftp://Your_Web.com/Your_Folder/Your_File");
    ftp.Method = WebRequestMethods.Ftp.UploadFile;

    ftp.Credentials = new NetworkCredential("Your_Username", "Your_Password");

    StreamReader fileToSend = new StreamReader("Your_File_Location");
    byte[] fileContents = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(fileToSend.ReadToEnd());
    fileToSend.Close(); //Close the open file

    Stream sendFile = ftp.GetRequestStream();
    sendFile.Write(fileContents, 0, fileContents.Length);
    sendFile.Close(); //Close the sending stream

    FtpWebResponse ftpResponse = (FtpWebResponse)ftp.GetResponse();    
    Console.WriteLine("Upload complete. Status {0}", ftpResponse.StatusDescription); //Output the results of the transfer

    ftp.Close(); //Close the FTP connection
}

Code breakdown

Hopefully everything is fairly straight forward. In order for this to work you simply need to provide the information in the table below to the relevant fields.