SFTP Setup Guide

Follow our setup guide to sync files from your SSH server to your destination using SFTP.

Prerequisiteslink

To set up the Fivetran SFTP connector, you need the following:

• An account on an SSH server containing files with supported filetypes and encodings
• The ability to log in to this account using either a password or key pair
• Fivetran’s IP addresses safelisted in your firewall

Setup instructionslink

Begin Fivetran configurationlink

1. In the connector setup form, enter the Destination schema and Destination table name of your choice.

2. If you use a keypair for logging into your SFTP server, set the Login with keypair? toggle to ON. Make a note of the automatically generated public key and proceed to the next section.

   

3. If you do not use a keypair for logging into your SFTP server, proceed to the final section.

Configure your keypair in a text editorlink

This step is only required if your SSH user account uses key pairs to log in. Accounts using standard password login may skip this section.

You need to create a group and SSH user, add the SSH user to the group, create the .ssh directory and authorized_keys file, and grant them permissions, unless they already exist and have the permissions granted. To do it, log in to your SSH tunnel host and run the following commands:

1. Create group fivetran:

   sudo groupadd fivetran
   

2. Create an SSH user fivetran:

   sudo useradd -m -g fivetran fivetran
   

3. Switch to your fivetran user:

   sudo su - fivetran
   

4. Create the .ssh directory:

   mkdir ~/.ssh
   

5. Grant the .ssh directory permissions:

   chmod 700 ~/.ssh
   

6. Switch to the .ssh directory:

   cd ~/.ssh
   

7. Create the authorized_keys file:

   touch authorized_keys
   

8. Grant the authorized_file permissions:

   chmod 600 authorized_keys
   

Using your favorite text editor, add the public ssh key from the Fivetran setup form to the authorized_keys file. The key must be all on one line. Make sure no line breaks are introduced when cutting and pasting.

Add the Fivetran public key to the /.ssh/Authorized_keys file on any SSH account you wish to use.

Finish Fivetran configuration link

1. In the connector setup form, enter the following details:

   • Password (not required for keypair login)
   • Username
   • Host Address
   • Port

2. Choose your configuration options. Using these configuration options, you can select subsets of your folders, specific types of files, and more to sync only the files you need in your destination. In addition, setting up multiple connectors targeted at the same file system but with different options allows you to slice and dice a file system any way you’d like.

   You can use the following configuration options:

   • (Optional) Folder Path - Use the folder path to specify a portion of the file system in which you’d like Fivetran to look for files. We examine files under the specified folder and all of its nested subfolders for files we can sync. If you don’t provide a prefix, we’ll look through the entire file system for files to sync.

   • (Optional) File Pattern - Use a regular expression as the file pattern to decide whether or not to sync specific files. The pattern applies to everything under the prefix (folder path). If you’re unsure what regular expression to use, you can leave this field blank, and we’ll sync everything under the prefix.

     For example, if under the prefix logs, you have three folders: 2017, 2016, and errors. Using the pattern \d\d\d\d/.*, you can exclude all the files in the errors folder because:

     • \d\d\d\d only applies to the folders whose name consists of four consecutive digits, and
     • .* after / applies to any files in these folders

     TIP: You can learn to write your regex and test it out.

   • File Type - Use the file type to choose the parsing strategy for files without file extensions. If you save your files with improper extensions, you can force them to be synced as the selected file type.

     • If you select infer, we infer the type from a file’s extension (.csv, .tsv, .json, .avro, or .log).

     • If you choose a file type, we interpret every file we examine as the file type you select, so make sure everything we sync has the same file type.

       For example, if you have an automated CSV output system that saves files without a .csv extension, you can specify the type as csv, and we will sync them correctly as CSVs.

   • Compression - Use the compression option to choose the compression strategy to decompress files without compression extensions. If your files are compressed but do not have extensions indicating the compression method, you can decompress them according to the selected compression algorithm.

     • If all of your compressed files are correctly marked with a matching compression extension (.bz2, .gz, .gzip, .tar, or .zip), you can select infer.

     • If you select uncompressed, we do not decompress the files and sync the uncompressed files.

     • If you choose a compression format, we decompress every file using the format you select.

       For example, if you have an automated CSV output system that GZIPs files to save space but saves them without a .gzip extension, you can set this field to GZIP. We will decompress every file that we examine using GZIP.

   • Error Handling - Use the error handling option to choose how to handle errors in your files. If you know that your files contain some errors, you can choose to skip poorly formatted lines.

     • If you select skip, we ignore improperly formatted data within a file, allowing you to sync only valid data.

     • If you select fail, we do not sync a file if we detect improperly formatted data in the file.

       TIP: We recommend that you select fail unless you are sure that you have undesirable, malformed data.

     You will receive a notification on your Fivetran dashboard if we encounter errors.

3. (Optional) To use the advanced configuration options, set the Enable Advanced Options toggle to ON.

   You can use the following configuration options for specific use cases:

   • Modified File Merge - Use this option to let Fivetran know how to update files in the destination. When you modify a previously synced file, should we replace the rows in the destination table or append the new rows to the table:

     • upsert_file replaces records in destination, using the filename and line number as the primary key.

     • append_file appends records.

   • (Optional) Archive Folder Pattern - Use a regular expression to filter and sync files from archived folders. We sync the files in compressed archives with filenames matching the specified pattern. If there are multiple files within archive (TAR or ZIP) folders, you can use the archive folder pattern to filter file types.

     For example, if you specify the archive folder pattern as .*json, we will sync only the files that end in a .json file extension from the archive folder.

   • (Optional) Null Sequence - Specify the value indicating null if your CSVs use a special value indicating null.

     Only use this field if you are sure your CSVs have a null sequence. CSVs have no native notion of a null character. However, some CSV generators have created one, using characters such as \N to represent null.

     TIP: The text is un-escaped before the null sequence is matched, so don’t use the escape character in your null sequence.

   • (Optional) Delimiter - Specify the delimiter. The delimiter is a character used in CSV files to separate one field from the next. Fivetran tries to infer the delimiter, but in some cases, this is impossible. If your files sync with the wrong number of columns, consider setting this value.

     • If you leave this field blank, we infer the delimiter for each file. You can store files of many different types of delimiters in the same folder with no problems.

     • If you specify a delimiter, we parse all the CSV files in your folder path with this delimiter.

   • (Optional) Escape Character - Set the escape character if your CSV generator follows non-standard rules for escaping quotation marks.

     Only use this field if you are sure your CSVs have a different escape character. CSVs have a special rule for escaping quotation marks compared to other characters; they require two consecutive double quotes to represent an escaped double quote. However, some CSV generators do not follow this rule and use different characters like backslash for escaping.

   • (Optional) Skip Header Lines - Use this option to skip over fixed-length headers at the beginning of your CSV files.

     Some CSV-generating programs include additional header lines at the top of the file. The header consists of a few lines that do not match the format of the rest of the rows in the file. These header rows can cause undesired behavior because we attempt to parse them as if they were records in your CSV.

   • (Optional) Skip footer Lines - Use this option to skip over fixed-length footers at the end of your CSV files.

     Some CSV-generating programs include a footer at the bottom of the file. The footer consists of a few lines that do not match the format of the rest of the rows in the file. These footer rows can cause undesired behavior because we attempt to parse them as if they were records in your CSV.

   • (Optional) Headerless Files - Set the toggle to ON if your CSV-generating software doesn’t provide a header line for the documents. Fivetran can generate the generic column names and sync data rows with them.

     Some CSV-generating programs do not include column name headers for the files; they only contain data rows. When you set the toggle to ON, we generate generic column names following the convention of column_0, column_1, … column_n to map the rows.

4. Click Save & Test. Fivetran will take it from here.

5. Confirm that the server SSH key is trusted when the initial tests are run.

   

Related Contentlink

description Connector Overview

assignment Release Notes

settings API Connector Configuration

home Documentation Home