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Connect SFTP to your preprocessing pipeline, and use the Unstructured Ingest CLI or the Unstructured Ingest Python library to batch process all your documents and store structured outputs locally on your filesystem.

You will need:

The SFTP prerequisites:

  • The SFTP server hostname, port, username, and password.

    SFTP servers are offered by several vendors. For example, the following video shows how to create and set up an SFTP server by using AWS Transfer Family:

  • The directory path to start accessing data from, specified as sftp://<path>/<to>/<directory>.

See the SFTP documentation.

The SFTP connector dependencies:

CLI, Python
pip install "unstructured-ingest[sftp]"

You might also need to install additional dependencies, depending on your needs. Learn more.

The following environment variables:

  • SFTP_HOST - The SFTP hostname, represented by --host (CLI) or host (Python).
  • SFTP_PORT - The SFTP port number, represented by --port (CLI) or port (Python).
  • SFTP_REMOTE_URL - The directory path to start accessing data from, represented by --remote-url (CLI) or remote_url (Python).
  • SFTP_USERNAME - The SFTP username, represented by --username (CLI) or username (Python).
  • SFTP_PASSWORD - The SFTP password, represented by --password (CLI) or password (Python).

Now call the Unstructured Ingest CLI or the Unstructured Ingest Python library. The destination connector can be any of the ones supported. This example uses the local destination connector.

This example sends data to Unstructured API services for processing by default. To process data locally instead, see the instructions at the end of this page.

For the Unstructured Ingest CLI and the Unstructured Ingest Python library, you can use the --partition-by-api option (CLI) or partition_by_api (Python) parameter to specify where files are processed:

  • To do local file processing, omit --partition-by-api (CLI) or partition_by_api (Python), or explicitly specify partition_by_api=False (Python).

    Local file processing does not use an Unstructured API key or API URL, so you can also omit the following, if they appear:

    • --api-key $UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY (CLI) or api_key=os.getenv("UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY") (Python)
    • --partition-endpoint $UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL (CLI) or partition_endpoint=os.getenv("UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL") (Python)
    • The environment variables UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY and UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL
  • To send files to Unstructured API services for processing, specify --partition-by-api (CLI) or partition_by_api=True (Python).

    Unstructured API services also requires an Unstructured API key and API URL, by adding the following:

    • --api-key $UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY (CLI) or api_key=os.getenv("UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY") (Python)
    • --partition-endpoint $UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL (CLI) or partition_endpoint=os.getenv("UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL") (Python)
    • The environment variables UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY and UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL, representing your API key and API URL, respectively.

    Get an API key and API URL.