Note: This article contains detailed technical instructions on setting up an SFTP integration, and is intended for your IT department or HRIS representative.

A Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) integration is a great way to sync your Nectar employee data with the data in your HRIS. Nectar supports a secure, one-way connection that imports data files from HRIS tools that support SFTP or third party SFTP clients.

Depending on your HRIS, you may need to contact your HRIS representative for assistance. Our support team ([email protected]) are happy to assist with any questions you might have.

You'll need to configure some integration settings in Nectar in order to set up your SFTP connection. To find these settings:

To set up an SFTP integration, you'll need to create an SSH Key Pair. This is to ensure that the SFTP connection via your client/HRIS is unique and secure.

An SSH key pair is a pair of unique keys that are generated by you and saved on your computer. There's a private key which should only be used by you (or very carefully within your own organization), and there's a public key which can safely be shared outside your organization. The integration uses the combination of the two keys to verify the security of the connection.

Note: The Employee Data Integration only supports openSSH key pairs, not SSH2. If your HRIS or command line tool generates keys in SSH2 format, you can convert them to openSSH using the instructions in the troubleshooting guide below.

First, check that you have the command line tools you need to generate openSSH keys:

If you're using a Mac OS:

If you're using a Windows OS:

What if I don't have a command line tool? There are free, opensource key generator apps available to download. A commonly-used tool for generating SSH Key Pairs for Windows is PuTTYgen.

Run the command ssh-keygen -t rsa to generate a new key pair.

When prompted, enter a file path and filename to save the new key pair to, for example users/firstname.lastname/department-key-pair/[filename]. We recommend you create a new folder to save your key pair to so that you don't overwrite any existing key pairs you may have saved.

You may be asked for a passphrase. It's a good idea to set (and keep a record of) a passphrase if you want to, but it's not compulsory.

You can now navigate to the file in which your keys are saved, and:

What if my computer is not set up to accept this command? The ssh-keygen or puttygen apps can be downloaded for free with a search online.

NOTE: Be wary of sharing your private key. Don't send it anywhere via email, text or through any other insecure means. Multiple key pairs can be generated so you can choose to have a private key per person/SFTP connection.

There's specific information about how to correctly format and save SSH keys here.

The popular SFTP Client Filezilla has helpful documentation about how to set up keys here - https://wiki.filezilla-project.org/Howto

Using the Hostname and Username provided on the setup page, along with your Private Key generated above, you’ll now be able to set the connection with your SFTP client, and upload employee data files in CSV/XLSX format via that connection. Please note that CSV's should be with UTF-8 encoding and the separator a comma (,).

Most SFTP clients will require the following information to set a connection:

Make sure the hostname and username you use to set up your SFTP client are copied directly from the setup form in Nectar. Both are case-sensitive. You can find these on the Data integration setup page.

If required by your SFTP client, you may specify / as the upload directory

When interacting with our SFTP integration option, please note that we only allow the "PUT" command. We do not allow customers to interact with this type of integration in any other way such as "Write", "Delete" or "Get".

You may receive a 'connection refused' error when setting up an SFTP client. This could be because your organization has an internal Firewall (either a local or network firewall) that's blocking the SFTP connection.

If this is the case, your firewall needs to be configured to allow outbound access via the hostname (NOT bound to a specific IP address: the IP will change) on TCP Port 22.

Make sure the hostname and username you use to set up your SFTP client are copied directly from the setup form in Nectar. Both are case-sensitive.

Make sure your HRIS supports both SFTP and SSH. Our SFTP only supports openSSH key pairs, not SSH2. If your HRIS or command line tool generates keys in SSH2 format, you can convert them to openSSH using the instructions in the guide below.

To convert an SSH2 public key into openSSH format:

Locate your public SSH key (named for example ssh2.pub). This is a file that, when you open it, contains this kind of information:

---- BEGIN SSH2 PUBLIC KEY ----...---- END SSH2 PUBLIC KEY ----

Ensure that the file has the file format .pub

Run this command on the SSH2 file: ssh-keygen -i -f ssh2.pub > openssh.pub

If you had a working Employee Data Integration but it fails, it could be because our hostname has changed. You can reset your integration to use the new hostname/target directory by:

You've now reset your integration to point to the new server, using the target directory of "/".

If your SFTP client has an ability to test the connection, be sure to check that the updated settings are operational.