Revised Apr 14 2004
Dreamweaver is web-authoring software that has the capability of "publishing" your webpages by letting you directly upload them onto a web server. Because the UA web servers are protected by SSH, the file-transport mechanism (FTP) used by Dreamweaver4 and DreamweaverMX must tunnel SSH to get to the server. DreamweaverMX 2004, however, uses SecureFTP which eliminates the need to use tunneling.

An SSH tunnel must be established and be open for the FTP of Dreamweaver4 and MX to work. When you tunnel SSH, you are basically telling Dreamweaver's FTP to hand-off files to SSH.

Here are instructions for SSH tunneling with Dreamweaver4 and for configuring DreamweaverMX 2004 to use SFTP.

Configuring Your Tunnel

• For Windows you must configure SSH tunneling.
• For Mac OS X you need to issue one command in a Terminal window.

Configuring DreamweaverMX for Tunneling

• Start DreamweaverMX.
• Under the Site pulldown on the menu bar, select New Site.
• The window starts with Local Info in the Category pane on the left.
• You can choose Basic and Dreamweaver will walk you through items that need to be filled in or choose Advanced (as we did here) and enter the name you want to use for this configuration, like w3 in this example.
• For Local Root Folder enter the name of the folder on your PC or Mac where the site's webpages are located. If you click the folder icon to the right, you can browse for the folder.
• You can unclick the Refresh Local and Enable Cache boxes to save overhead.

  

• In the left pane click Remote Info.
• Next to Access, choose FTP from the pulldown and new options will drop down.
• For FTP Host use
  
  127.0.0.1 or localhost
  
  These two values are synonyms so either will work.
  Mac users need to also include the virtual port number :1024, as in
  
  127.0.0.1:1024 or localhost:1024
• Set the Host Directory to public_html if that is where you store most of your files.
• For Login use your NetID or your Login ID for the remote host..
• Enter your Password and check Save so it will be remembered from one login to the next. If you're on a public or shared machine, you should not save your password.
• Check Use Passive FTP. You need this for the tunnel to work.
• (Windows users see a Use SSH...login checkbox. Do not check this--it will try to download PuTTY which you do not need because your SSH software already performs that function.)
• If you have SSH already configured and running with a tunnel enabled, you can click the Test button to see if your configuration is correct. This only verifies the connection - it doesn't actually open the tunnel. Test will fail if your Password is not set in the window.
  

  

• Click OK.
• Click Done in the Site definition window.

Using Dreamweaver and Your SSH Tunnel

• Start SSH and connect to the remote host. You must have already defined an SSH tunnel for this site. Starting SSH automatically opens the tunnel.
• Under Dreamweaver
  • open the Files pane/window and choose the name of the Site definition you just created from Remote View
    or
    
  • from the Site pulldown choose Open Site and select the site definition.
• In the Site window that opens, click the connection icon in the middle of the toolbar. (The example below is MX running on Mac OS X. The Windows version is slightly different.)

  

• You have a couple ways to copy files in the Site window:
  • You can drag-and-drop files between the Remote and Local panes.
    -Highlight a file in one pane, use your mouse to drag it to the desired folder in the opposite pane and release your mouse.
  • You can use the arrows on the menu bar for uploading (Put on host) and downloading (Get locally).
    -Upload will place files in the Host Directory you specified in the Remote Info of your Site Definition.
    -Download will place files in the Local Root Folder you specified in the Local Info.
• When you have finished, click the connection icon again to disconnect from the tunnel and exit your SSH session with the remote host (to close your SSH tunnel).