[HoltFrak]

Hi all,
I'm trying to connect my desktop and laptop (both running Arch) to my server running Ubuntu Server via SFTP. Both are able to connect to the server via SSH no problem via terminal. When I go to add an SFTP source in Kodi, the option is not there. My first thought was that the add-on simply wasn't included in the pacman version of Kodi, but there is no VFS section (https://kodi.wiki/view/Add-on:SFTP_support) in my add-on menu as illustrated here:



It's just not there. This is on both my desktop and laptop, both installed using pacman. Here are my desktop's specs:

And here's my log:
log
I came across a reddit thread (I cannot find it now) that described the same problem I was having on a different distro. The solution was to nuke the userdata folder in .kodi, but that didn't work for me.
Any ideas?

[asavah]

Linux distros have to build and package binary addons themselves.
Ask your distro's mantainer(s) of the kodi package to provide kodi-vfs-sftp package.
Or build the addon from source.

[HoltFrak]

Linux distros have to build and package binary addons themselves.
Ask your distro's mantainer(s) of the kodi package to provide kodi-vfs-sftp package.
Or build the addon from source.

Oh. That's unfortunate. I figured if that was the case I'd have run into someone saying that during my googling. I have no experience with cmake and the build from source is giving me a lot of trouble, should I make a new thread for that or is it ok to ask here?

[asavah]

should I make a new thread for that or is it ok to ask here?

IMO it should be ok to continue in this thread because this is your thread and any Arch user googling for this issue may find this thread useful if you manage to find the solution.

Building this addon should be pretty straightforward but sadly while I'm familiar with Arch packaging and build system I'm not an Arch user and I can't provide precise and 100% working step by step instructions.

The sources are located here https://github.com/xbmc/vfs.sftp but don't use the steps in the Readme, there is an easier way which does not require building Kodi itself from source.

Make sure you install git, kodi-dev, kodi-platform, p8-platform, libssh, cmake, pkgconf, gcc , openssl, zlib, most of these packages should be already present, I might forget something here but we'll see.

Clone the addon source, your $HOME dir should be fine

Code:

git clone --branch Matrix https://github.com/xbmc/vfs.sftp.git

And let's try building it:

Code:

cd vfs.sftp
mkdir build
cd build
cmake ../ -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr
make
sudo make install
​​​

This should build and install vfs.sftp as a system addon.
If you stumble into any errors please post full console output to Kodi Paste Site or any other pastebin site and post the link here.

[HoltFrak]

Make sure you install git, kodi-dev, kodi-platform, p8-platform, libssh, cmake, pkgconf, gcc , openssl, zlib, most of these packages should be already present, I might forget something here but we'll see.

I was getting some errors from cmake looking for a package config file from kodi last night. The problem was that I didn't have kodi-dev installed. Once I installed that package it built fine, thank you very much for your help!
Slightly related to the initial problem, is kodi able to take advantage of key-authentication over ssh?

[asavah]

is kodi able to take advantage of key-authentication over ssh?

I don't know, never used vfs.sftp , I prefer NFS exports.

[HoltFrak]

OK, I'll do some more googling and play around with it some more.

[Preacher]

OK, I'll do some more googling and play around with it some more.

If you're sharing stuff from the server over SFTP and can connect to it from this client, is it worth trying some fusemounts from the client so that the remote shares appears as local directories, then browse to these "local" areas?

I've done the same on my server - my NAS offers content over NFS, I've created NFS mounts on my Kodi box at OS level then Kodi thinks they're simply storage below its home directory.