How do I add FTP support to Eclipse?

Question

Eclipse natively supports FTP and SSH. Aptana is not necessary.

Native FTP and SSH support in Eclipse is in the "Remote System Explorer End-User Runtime" Plugin.

Install it through Eclipse itself. These instructions may vary slightly with your version of Eclipse:

1. Go to 'Help' -> 'Install New Software' (in older Eclipses, this is called something a bit different)
2. In the 'Work with:' drop-down, select your version's plugin release site. Example: for Kepler, this is
   Kepler - http://download.eclipse.org/releases/kepler
3. In the filter field, type 'remote'.
4. Check the box next to 'Remote System Explorer End-User Runtime'
5. Click 'Next', and accept the terms. It should now download and install.
6. After install, Eclipse may want to restart.

Using it, in Eclipse:

1. Window -> Open Perspective -> (perhaps select 'Other') -> Remote System Explorer
2. File -> New -> Other -> Remote System Explorer (folder) -> Connection (or type Connection into the filter field)
3. Choose FTP from the 'Select Remote System Type' panel.
4. Fill in your FTP host info in the next panel (username and password come later).
5. In the Remote Systems panel, right-click the hostname and click 'connect'.
6. Enter username + password and you're good!
7. Well, not exactly 'good'. The RSE system is fairly unusual, but you're connected.
8. And you're one smart cookie! You'll figure out the rest.

Edit: To change the default port, follow the instructions on this page: http://ikool.wordpress.com/2008/07/25/tips-to-access-ftpssh-on-different-ports-using-eclipse-rse/

Install Aptana plugin to your Eclipse installation.

It has built-in FTP support, and it works excellently.

You can:

• Edit files directly from the FTP server
• Perform file/folder management (copy, delete, move, rename, etc.)
• Upload/download files to/from FTP server
• Synchronize local files with FTP server. You can make several profiles (actually projects) for this so you won't have to reinput over and over again.

As a matter of fact the FTP support is so good I'm using Aptana (or Eclipse + Aptana) now for all my FTP needs. Plus I get syntax highlighting/whatever coding support there is. Granted, Eclipse is not the speediest app to launch, but it doesn't bug me so much.

have you checked RSE (Remote System Explorer) ? I think it's pretty close to what you want to achieve.

a blog post about it, with screenshots

I'm not sure if this works for you, but when I do small solo PHP projects with Eclipse, the first thing I set up is an Ant script for deploying the project to a remote testing environment. I code away locally, and whenever I want to test it, I just hit the shortcut which updates the remote site.

Eclipse has good Ant support out of the box, and the scripts aren't hard to make.

SFTP Plug-in: http://www.jcraft.com/eclipse-sftp/ :)

As none of the other solutions mentioned satisfied me, I wrote a script that uses WinSCP to sync local directories in a project to a FTP(S)/SFTP/SCP Server when eclipse's autobuild feature is triggered. Obviously, this is a Windows-only solution.

Maybe someone finds this useful: http://rays-blog.de/2012/05/05/94/use-winscp-to-upload-files-using-eclipses-autobuild-feature/