The rest of the steps will be the same, except you won't be prompted to change your key. If you are already using the PuTTY SSH client to interact with OpenShift then you should already have the proper private key.

You will find that almost all Linux servers will be running an OpenSSH server so these instructions are useful outside of OpenShift. In the instructions below I will show you how to convert your OpenSSH key into a PuTTY key. The problem with using FileZilla with OpenShift is that our servers (and our command line tools) all use OpenSSH private/public keys, while FileZilla uses PuTTY keys. Remember to guard your private key because if someone gets ahold of it they can log into any machine where they know the username and you have your public key. If the remote machine can decrypt the signature then you are all set to log in. When you go to authenticate to the remote machine, your local machine generates a one-time signature from your private key that can only be decrypted by the public key. The basic idea is that, rather than using passwords, you have a private key on your local machine and a public key on the remote machine. In addition, OpenShift uses SSH keys for authentication. So the same goes for any file transfer - only over secure connections. As you should already know, all communications between your local machine and your gears happen over SSH (git pushes and direct SSH access). While FileZilla can do normal FTP (does anyone still use that on the intertubes?) we are going to use it for SFTP (secure FTP). Here is another little helpful post by Katie talking about using OpenShift from a Windows machine. While all platforms can use FileZilla, this tutorial is mostly going to be focused for Windows Developers since the SFTP and SCP command line tools are not native on your systems. It also has some great features that may make it your preferred means for moving files around. I often use it when I want to copy multiple files up to the server or download a database backup. Filezilla works on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Rather than having to memorize the syntax of the scp or sftp commands, you can use a GUI tool to drag and drop files from your machine to the remote location.

Greetings Shifters! Today I am going to cover how to use FileZilla as a graphical interface to transfer files between your local machine and your OpenShift gears.

Filezilla sftp connect