What is an FTP client?

Question

Could someone give me a concise description of an FTP client, what I would use one for, and give your opinion on whether one would be useful to me?

Answer 1

A client application is a program which makes requests to a server (like a customer asking a waiter for a cup of coffee; 'client,' 'server,' get it?) Your web browser (Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chome, Safari, whichever) is a client program. It makes requests on your behalf to servers that hold web pages.

An FTP client is just the same, only it makes requests on your behalf to FTP servers. An FTP server is a program, usually running on a server computer, which allows users to upload, download and delete files on the server computer (whereas your web browsing client may have only the most rudimentary uploading and deleting capabilities.)

Answer 2

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It as a protocol to transer or copy files from one machine to another. You need a client to copy files from a server that is running this protocol. Most web browsers have that protocol built in so you already have a client. It's up to you to decide if you need a more specialized client for some purpose. There are a number of freely available FTP clients, such as FileZilla and Free-FTP, of which FileZilla is particularly feature-rich.

In the early days of the Internet it was more common to share repositories of files using "anonymous" FTP servers. Actually, it's still pretty common today. You can log in as user "anonymous", and select from their collection of freely available files for downloading. It is a way to share stuff, usually open source programs.

For example: ftp://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/gentoo/

Answer 3

You would need one if you needed to interact with a FTP server.

These days, authenticated file transfer can be done with SSH or HTTP, and anonymous file transfer can be done with HTTP, leaving far less need for FTP than there once was.

Answer 4

and not forgetting the famous scp which can be used as well with ssh. These two are alot more secure than FTP. so you might consider using them. If you still insist on using ftp, you might want to use this http://filezilla-project.org/

Answer 5

A FTP client is an application that runs on your computer. You enter an address, username and password to connect to a (FTP) server.

The most common use for FTP clients these days is to transfer files from your own computer to a web server (web host).

So if you have a site hosted on e.g. Dreamhost, you would use a FTP client to transfer local files to there. Could be PHP files, HTML files, images, a set of files like a WordPress installation.

You can also use the FTP client to download files from the web server, for example to back them up.

There are more secure variations on FTP like SFTP. FTP clients typically support them as well and hide away the technical differences.

Answer 6

What I would use one for?

An FTP client is an application that allows you to upload and download files to a server called an FTP Server using the FTP protocol. It's a very old protocol and quite insecure as it sends password/username/data in the clear. A more secure variant is called SFTP and there are clients that support this as well as the traditional insecure FTP.

Give your opinion on whether one would be useful to me?

It might well be seeing as your handle is "Web_Designer". Many web servers want you to upload files using FTP or SFTP. So in that case you may well need a client if this is the only method they provide or if you're uploading many files it may be quicker than using the web provided uploader.