Perl - Best way to establish an SFTP connection on windows - perl

Question

I need to put files in a remote directory using SFTP on a Windows machine. I've tried Net::SFTP::Foreign though I can't use it because it needs IO::Pty which is not available on Windows machine. What's the best/simplest way to do this?
Update With Requested Info:
Here are the versions I'm using:
Net::SFTP::Foreign : v 1.89
Net::SSH2 : v 0.69
Net::SFTP::Foreign::Backend::Net_SSH2 : v 0.09
and here is the gist of my code:
$ssh2 = Net::SSH2->new();
$ssh2->connect($host) || die "connect failed";
$ssh2->auth_password($user, $pass) || die "password auth failed";
$sftp = Net::SFTP::Foreign->new(ssh2 => $ssh2,
backend => 'Net_SSH2');
$sftp->error and
die "Unable to stablish SFTP connection: ". $sftp->error;
Right now I'm just trying to establish a connection. I will need to put files on the server. The erro I'm receiving is as follows:
Net::SSH2::timeout(ss, timeout) at C:/Strawberry/perl/site/lib/Net/SSH2.pm line 111, <STDIN> line 1.

Answer 1

The preferred way to use Net::SFTP::Foreign in Windows is probably to use the Net::SFTP::Foreign::Backend::Net_SSH2 backend (update: a Perl module available from CPAN) which uses Net::SSH2 under the hood (which is already included with Strawberry Perl, update: otherwise, you will need to build and install libssh2 yourself which sometimes is not as easy as it should be).
Another option is to tell Net::SFTP::Foreign to use the plink command to run the SSH connection (search for plink on the module docs). Update:plink is part of the PuTTY application distribution, a very popular SSH client that may be already installed in that machine.
Finally you can also try using Net::SSH::Any which provides its own backend for Net::SFTP::Foreign and can run on top of several SSH clients and modules... but it is still in beta!

Answer 2

I have several cross-platform scripts that are using Net::SFTP::Foreign using plink on windows and openssh on linux and it works great. Windows is using the latest strawberry perl release.
my $sftp = Net::SFTP::Foreign->new(
host=> $server,
ssh_cmd => $plink, #Contains full path to plink or path to ssh
user=> $user,
more => ['-i', $keyfile],
stderr_discard => 1,
);
The only thing about using the plink backend is that you have to first manually establish a connection using psftp or Putty gui so it stores the trust confirmation in the registry. After that it is good to go from the script.
The nice thing is you can just have the actual path to ssh or to plink defined in a system level config file and the script just reads what is needed on that particular platform. ie (...\bin\Putty\plink.exe or /usr/bin/ssh )
Not a pure Perl solution, but has been very robust. I don't see IO::Pty on any of my windows boxes so no dependency there for plink.

Answer 3

SFTP is actually SSH with a wrapper to simulate the FTP like commands, so a mdir is actually a ssh 'ls /path/to/dir'.
While there might be a Perl SFTP package that avoids IO::Pty, you might get to your solution much faster by just translating the "FTP" commands into their ssh / scp equivalents and looking at Net::SSH
--- Adding an Example as requested ---
#!/bin/env perl
use Net::OpenSSH ();
my $connection = Net::OpenSSH->new('somehost.com', user => 'myuser', password => 'mypassword' );
my #ls = $connection->capture("ls");
printf "remote listing is %s\n", join(', ', #ls);
This should list the files to your console.
You mentioned not having IO::Pty because it is not available for a windows machine. Perhaps you should be attempting to install IO::Pty::Easy. Note that Net::OpenSSH uses IO::Pty too, but that should be possible to do on windows, provided you also install Glib as indicated in this post http://www.perlmonks.org/bare/?node_id=856863
Good luck!