How to use SCP to transfer files securely in the Terminal

SCP stands for Secure Copy Protocol it's based on SSH which allows us to access the remote system over the secure connection. The Good thing about SSH is we can connect to the remote system and execute the commands.

Copying files from Local Machine to Remote Server with SCP

This is really helpful when you have to copy any files from the local machine to the remote server or vise versa. If you love GUI you can use programs like Filezilla to copy the files over the FTP.

Copying files in the Terminal with SCP is really easy.

All you have to do is Open the terminal can enter the command.

scp /home/letsfoss/myfolder root@SERVER-IP:/var/www/folder

The above command is for copying the folder contents from the local machine to the remote server.

Let's break down the command.

scp is the program which helps to perform the file copying operation.
/home/letsfoss/myfolder is the local folder which I want to copy into the server
root@SERVER-IP root is my SSH username and SERVER-IP is the actual server IP
:/var/www/folder This is the path on the remote server where I want to copy all the contents from the local machine.

Once you have all the information, press the Enter key and you'll be prompted with a password input.

Enter your password and press enter key to start copying from the local machine to the remote server with SCP.

Copying files from Remote Server to Local Machine with SCP

For transferring the files from the remote server to the local machine we have to alter the command a bit.

scp root@SERVER-IP:/var/www/myapp /home/letsfoss/myapp

When transferring the files from a remote server to the local machine we have to specify the server IP in the first argument and the local path in the second argument.

Break down of the above command