Accessing FTP on Google Compute Engine

Question

I'm running an instance on debian-7-wheezy and I'm sort of new to the Google Compute Engine. I have looked through both the support requests on this site and the FAQ post on the Google website; however I found nothing that I could follow completely.

I know a small amount about Linux (managed a dedicated Debian box for about 6 months), but I can't access SSH from my home PC either.

I would love a step-by-step walkthrough on how I can go about accessing FTP/SFTP using WinSCP (or another file browser) and how I can access SSH from my home PC using Putty from creation of the instance to connection to the instance.

Thank you in advance for your help and sorry for being a newb.

Answer 1

Using gcloud (provided as part of Google Cloud SDK) connect to your instance using SSH.

gcloud compute ssh instancename

If you are connecting for the first time, this will prompt you to create SSH keys. As part of this this will also create .ppk file which will be used to Putty to SSH into your instance.

Download and Install FileZilla

Goto Edit->Setting->SFTP

Click on Add Key File button, and point it to the PPK file generated.

Once this is done, you can connect to your instance using FileZilla SFTP. Specify your instance's public IP address in the host field (stfp://instanceipaddress). You would not need to specify any password.

Answer 2

Looks like a similar question to this one , Adding same answer here too

At a high level, these are the steps:

1. Install and run the gcloud SDK ($ gcloud init)
2. Generate SSH key ($ gcloud compute ssh)
3. Setup the FTP client (install and add the key file)
4. Connect to the VM using the SFTP client

Assuming this question was asked here before this documentation from Google was available.

Also, I have recorded this, it might be helpful:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ssfE6ODpak

And just an FYI .. if the files that you need to transfer are pretty small in size then maybe you don’t need a SFTP client. Transfer directly from the console as seen here https://youtu.be/HEdXEEYOynE