Building an FTP Client in Python

The first step is to import ftplib. As mentioned in the guides on building a simple web server and building a web client, the socket module is used by most every Python module that needs to interface with a port. The FTP library is no different. It relies primarily on the SOCKS module but defers to the socket module if the former is not found. The socket module ships with standard Python. The ftplib module takes care of creating the socket connection and maintaining it. So fire up your favourite text editor and enter the following:

import ftplib

Next, we will look at how to initiate the connection.