How to Access FTP Servers from Nautilus in Ubuntu Linux

If you do any kind of web development, or if you often share and download files, then it's likely that you work with FTP servers. Usually, you have have an FTP client to interact with servers--something like FileZilla or gFTP. I recently discovered a little-known feature in GNOME/Ubuntu Linux: it's possible to directly access FTP servers in the Nautilus file-manger, no extra FTP client required.

First go to Places > Connect to Server. A dialogue will pop up where you can select the type of server you'd like to connect to. Select FTP (with login), and then enter the server name, your username, and password. If you'd like to keep this configuration for future reference, you can also check the "Add Bookmark" option and give your bookmark a name. Click on the Connect button, and you should be good to go. It's really that easy!

If you chose to create a bookmark, then the server will automatically appear in the Bookmarks menu on your main panel and in the bookmarks sidebar in the Nautilus file manager. Connecting to FTP servers this way make it super easy to upload and download via simple drag-and-drop, and really makes simple FTP operations more accessible for "regular" people that might be intimidated by standard 2 or 4 pane FTP client interfaces.

As useful as this cool little trick is, you won't want want to be hanging up your copies of FileZilla, gFTP, and FireFTP quite yet. From what I can tell, there are definitely some limitations to the FTP support Nautilus. When I right clicked on a file on an FTP server in Nautilus, for instance, I was able to view permissions or change permissions on any files. There also no extra features that you might be used to having in dedicated FTP clients like manual switchign between Binary and ASCII mode, file duplicate management, compression options, timestamp management, etc.

Accessing FTP servers from the Nautilus file manager in Ubuntu Linux is definitely useful for the quick and dirty upload and/or download, but I would keep around a dedicated FTP client for serious work and website management.

Enjoy!