WinSCP Technical Requirements

Using WinSCP, you can connect to an SSH (Secure Shell) server with SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) or SCP (Secure Copy Protocol) service, to an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server or HTTP server with WebDAV service.

SFTP is a standard part of the SSH-2 package. SCP is a standard part of the SSH-1 package. You can also run both protocols on the latter SSH version. WinSCP supports both SSH-1 and SSH-2. For authentication, you can use user name and password or public key (RSA or DSA). Other authorization types include TIS, Cryptocard, Keyboard-interactive, and Kerberos.

For FTP, both the basic unencrypted variant and FTPS are supported. Compressed transfers (Zlib) are not supported.

For WebDAV, both the basic unencrypted variant and WebDAVS are supported. Compressed transfers (Zlib) are not supported.

For SFTP, the only requirement beyond the server requirements above is to run SFTP on the server. It is best to run it as an SSH-2 subsystem. If you select SFTP-only on the Login dialog and the SFTP subsystem is not found, WinSCP will try to find the SFTP server in some common directories (/usr/lib/sftp-server, /usr/local/lib/sftp-server, etc.). This way, it is possible to use SFTP even with SSH-1, which does not support subsystems.

A number of restricted shell environments exist for supporting SFTP/SCP only accounts. These systems restrict an user to a small subset of commands needed to manipulate files, while denying an ability to execute arbitrary commands. Some of these environments create incompatibilities with WinSCP, particularly if using SCP.

Most shells nowadays offer options to make the user experience better. Unfortunately many of these options make the shell incompatible with WinSCP.

This mainly affects the SCP protocol. An example is colorized output from the ls command that includes ANSI color sequences which WinSCP cannot parse.

Also, the SFTP protocol can be affected. A typical example is where some message is printed from a start-up script. WinSCP (and any other SFTP client) will attempt to parse the message as an SFTP packet, which will obviously fail.

You should configure your start-up scripts to conform to non-interactive sessions (like WinSCP). Some shells call different profile/start-up scripts for interactive and non-interactive sessions. You can also use some environment variables, such as TERM to distinguish interactive and non-interactive sessions.

WinSCP runs on Microsoft Windows XP SP2/Windows Server 2003 SP1 and newer, up to Windows 10/Windows Server 2016. It runs both on client and server editions of Microsoft Windows. We know of no reason why WinSCP should not continue to work on future versions of Microsoft Windows.

While there is 32-bit version of WinSCP available only, it runs on 64-bit editions of Microsoft Windows.

On Windows Server, WinSCP runs both in “Server with Desktop Experience” (“Server with a GUI”) and “Server Core” installation options.

WinSCP also runs on Wine. See WinSCP entry on Wine AppDB.

WinSCP requires 35-70 MB of free disk space.

We take care to make WinSCP an accessible application, particularly to visually impaired people. WinSCP can be used on systems with screen readers.