I’m trying to use the FTP node with an SFTP server, and specifically trying to list documents within a location. It seems to work fine when I test with a local version of n8n running npx n8n and copying my workflow to there with the same SFTP server credentials.
What is the error message (if any)?
There is no error message, just an empty output when I list SFTP directory files on n8n cloud, however when I run on the local n8n workflow, it lists the files correctly.
Please share your workflow
Share the output returned by the last node
[
{}
]
Information on your n8n setup
Operating system: macOS 15.5 (24F74)
n8n Cloud:
core
n8nVersion: 1.100.1
platform: docker (cloud)
nodeJsVersion: 22.16.0
database: sqlite
executionMode: regular
concurrency: 5
license: community
consumerId: 00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000
storage
success: all
error: all
progress: false
manual: true
binaryMode: filesystem
pruning
enabled: true
maxAge: 168 hours
maxCount: 2500 executions
client
userAgent: mozilla/5.0 (macintosh; intel mac os x 10_15_7) applewebkit/537.36 (khtml, like gecko) chrome/137.0.0.0 safari/537.36
isTouchDevice: false
Local n8n:
core
n8nVersion: 1.100.1
platform: npm
nodeJsVersion: 22.16.0
database: sqlite
executionMode: regular
concurrency: -1
license: community
consumerId: unknown
storage
success: all
error: all
progress: false
manual: true
binaryMode: memory
pruning
enabled: true
maxAge: 336 hours
maxCount: 10000 executions
client
userAgent: mozilla/5.0 (macintosh; intel mac os x 10_15_7) applewebkit/537.36 (khtml, like gecko) chrome/137.0.0.0 safari/537.36
First, you need to bring your ftp online (in case if your server is from localhost).
Second, to make it happen, you can use tunneling with ngrok or cloudflare.
Third, use the url provided to the SFTP
My SFTP server is already online and is hosted on GCP Compute Engine. It’s running fine. I and other services can already connect to it.
n8n run locally can connect to it, however n8n Cloud can’t seem to connect. There’s no private key or passphrase required, so it should be quite simple to connect to. Just needs to be done over port 22 with SSH/SFTP.
The SFTP server itself has no firewall rules that deny IP addresses or ranges. It only requires TCP connections through port 22.
I’ve tried listing other directories and it seems to work. So not sure why listing one specific directory (with XLSX files within) is returning an empty output…
Well, it’s not folder permissions. The credentials I’m using are for the same SFTP user who is the owner of the folders and files. Folders have chmod of 755 and files have chmod of 644.
I tried in Cyberduck to create a new folder and upload files to see if that could be read.
I created a new folder /IN/reports_new as well as an empty /IN/test.txt file. When I tried to list the files in n8n, it actually gave me an error message this time:
list: No such file /IN/reports_new
I even deleted all but one file in the new folder, and it still gives me the same error.
I went back up one level to try to list the contents there (/IN), and it seems to give me an outdated list output:
No activity on this thread, sadly. I did some further investigation and I can see that the ssh2-sftp-client version in n8n-io/n8n is very old (v7; latest is v12). I’m going to attempt a version bump, however it is hard for me to test in Cloud environment since ssh2-sftp-client v7 worked in self-hosted/local n8n and its the n8n cloud which I’m struggling with.
After every n8n update I check if this works, and it seems like for v1.106.3 it’s been fixed! I can properly list my SFTP folder contents and download files
