Accessing Orbit using SSH file transfer protocol

For convenience, we provide an SFTP service for use with Orbit, our object storage system. SFTP is a file transfer protocol that runs over SSH, so all data is strongly encrypted in transit.

You can read and write objects using any SFTP-compatible client, such as Cyberduck, WinSCP, or just the standard sftp command line tool.

Just connect to sftp.orbit.brightbox.com using your Brightbox email address and password, or your API client identifier and secret.

$ sftp john@example.com@sftp.orbit.brightbox.com
john@example.com@sftp.orbit.brightbox.com's password: 
Connected to sftp.orbit.brightbox.com.

sftp> ls
container1
container2
images

If you are a collaborator on multiple accounts, then you can specify the account by adding the account identifier to the end of the username, separated with a colon:

$ sftp john@example.com:acc-xxxxx@sftp.orbit.brightbox.com

If your API Client is an “Orbit Storage Only” client then it won’t have privileges to actually get a list of containers, even the ones it has access to read or write, so they won’t show up in the list but you can still chdir into them:

$ sftp cli-xxxx@sftp.orbit.brightbox.com
cli-xxxx@sftp.orbit.brightbox.com's password: 
Connected to sftp.orbit.brightbox.com.

sftp> ls

sftp> cd container1

sftp> ls
object1
object2
object3

SFTP gives you convenient access to data stored in Orbit, but if you’re integrating Orbit into your system, we recommend that you use the OpenStack Swift-compatible HTTP interface rather than SFTP. The HTTP interface is higher performance and supports the full Orbit feature-set, such as managing metadata and configuring access control.