Portable Rsync With SSH For Windows

Based on github: fdcastel/cygrsync, a portable distribution of rsync with SSH for Windows. Uses the binaries from cygwin. Runs without cygwin installed.

Installation

npm install portable-rsync-with-ssh-for-windows

Usage

When run from the bin/ directory, the rsync and ssh commands believe that they are running from /bin/ and that the root is their parent folder.

To access Windows paths, you must specify them in cygwin format without the /cygdrive path prefix (as configured in etc/fstab). E.g., /c/my-folder points to C:\my-folder.

The exception is the home folder since etc/nsswitch.conf tells them to use your Windows home as the home directory.

By default, the command will try to use the keys defined in your "${env:home}\.ssh" (using your Windows home). The keys in here must be in Linux format (with LF line endings), not Windows format (with CRLF line endings).

The ssh binary that comes with this distribution cannot read keys with Windows line endings and will throw an invalid format error while trying to load the key. The OpenSSH version that comes preinstalled on Windows 10, on the other hand, can read keys with Linux line endings properly. So as long as your keys are written out with Linux line endings (e.g., generated from Windows Subsystem for Linux, etc.), then they will work under both Windows and this emulated cygwin rsync.

Note: Node.js always writes out files with LF line endings, even on Windows. So if you're generating your keys from Node.js, you should be fine with the default behaviour.

With Nexe

Include node_modules/@small-tech/portable-rsync-with-ssh-for-windows in your resources.

Reproducing

This was created by following the instructions on github: fdcastel/cygrsync to create an up-to-date distribution of rsync and SSH from cygwin.

The same set of libraries (some of which were newer versions) were copied from the resulting files.

Current versions

The current build has the following versions of the commands:

Rsync

Version 3.2.0 dev (protocol version 31)

SSH

• OpenSSH Version 8.3p1
• OpenSSL Version 1.1.1f (31 March, 2020)

(In our testing, this is compatible with what is currently installed on our Linux servers: rsync 3.1.3 protocol version 31 and OpenSSH 8.2p1, OpenSSL 1.1.1f 31 March, 2020.)