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I would allow direct downloading a file tree (or folder, whatever) directly from my website.

I will explain a bit more. My webhoster use Windows server 2012r2 and all websites are made with IIS service. The FTP is also made with IIS.

In this case, I want my users to directly download a folder from a button on my website. My question is : Does windows IIS (as FTP server) authorize the direct download of folders?

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  • Your question is pretty vague. Do you ask if it is possible to download a folder recursively with FTP? Or how to implement the recursive FTP download? In what language? Or how to "forward" the downloaded FTP folder to the web browser? Apr 17, 2015 at 8:50
  • My question is does IIS allow the download of entire folder directly ? Because I know that downloading a specific pdf, exe or txt is quiet a 'normal' thing. But can we download the whole content of a folder in a single action ?
    – Atnaize
    Apr 17, 2015 at 8:59
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    IIS as a Web server or IIS as an FTP server? Because you have FTP in your question, yet you write about a button on a web page. These are two different technologies. Apr 17, 2015 at 9:15
  • IIS as FTP server. Sorry for my lack of precision
    – Atnaize
    Apr 17, 2015 at 9:53
  • How do you plan (if you have any idea yet) to link your web page button to the FTP? Do you just plan to redirect the web browser to ftp:// URL? (i.e. to have the webbrowser handle the FTP download) Or do you plan to download the folder on the webserver and transfer it to the webbrowser via HTTP afterwards? Apr 17, 2015 at 10:29

2 Answers 2

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FTP is a protocol to transfer files, not directories/folders. So no, FTP in IIS does not support the direct download of folders.

That doesn't really matter because most modern FTP clients just do it for you anyways.

Point FileZilla to an IIS FTP site and drag a folder from the remote site to your local disk, that works just fine. The client just creates all the required folders and downloads each containing file individually, so to the user it looks like she downloaded just one folder.

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Depending on what you want to achieve, you can get around the problem by either asking your users to use Filezilla or any other advanced FTP client or you can provide archive (as ZIP files for instance).

The zip file generation can be easily automated so that you can update the files in your file tree and then trigger the compression processes.

Another solution would be to use an advanced web service such as OwnCloud (not sure it still works with IIS, but there are other alternatives).

Depending on your usecase, WebDAV could also be a possibility.

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