My open source project FTP Seer is on Google Search now. Yay!!! 🦄
Background of FTP Seer 💎 Back in the days, when I was working on an in-house project where the client requirements are to gather application logs from remote server using FTP protocol and show it on their admin portal, I needed a backend API to fetch directory list and get file contents.
I found the JSFTP library which is pretty useful for my case and decided to put that in my tech stack. After that, I use Node and ExpressJS to serve http server to create a RESTful API which has now become the FTP Seer API
Continue to develop 😎 The API serve its purpose and the in-house project was done. However, I felt the need to make it open-source and create a full-stack application so that other developers can utilise it as well. So, starting from three or four months back, I picked up the old API in my archived repository and polished it by refactoring. I even wrote a landing page so that people can test the API just by the first visit.
Giving it a demo client application 💄 In order to properly use it, I also created a frontend application with a framework that I was obsessed with back then which is Svelte and Sapper framework to serve it universally (Client, Server-Side, Service-Worker). The demo frontend application becomes FTP Seer Client.
Deploying the apps ⚙️ For deployment, since I didn't intend to purchase a domain for it, I used Heroku to deploy on their domain. I set up a CircleCI CI/CD pipeline so that whenever I push my latest commit it will deploy to heroku. The pipeline is available below FTP Seer API - https://circleci.com/gh/m3yevn/ftp-seer FTP Seer Client - https://circleci.com/gh/m3yevn/ftp-seer-client
and the configuration is at https://github.com/m3yevn/ftp-seer/blob/master/.circleci/config.ymlhttps://github.com/m3yevn/ftp-seer-client/blob/master/.circleci/config.yml
Making them available on Google 🌎 However, Heroku domains are bad in SEO search results, therefore I used meta tags to provide suitable keywords, images, authors to make Google to crawl properly. I used Google Search Console and get verification meta tags , add them on the respective index.html and we're good to go.
The final result is shown in the cover image where you can see both FTP Seer applications when you make a search on Google.
Stay safe and Thanks for reading! ❤️
Catch up with me at https://
Client and API as one story
Splitting FTP Seer into API and client was less about microservices fashion and more about clarity: the server speaks a stable contract; the UI experiments without breaking uploads for everyone else. SEO work on the side was its own discipline—plain language titles, pages that load without a carousel of screenshots, descriptions that say what the tool actually does.
That pairing—boring reliability plus discoverability—is how niche open source survives. Someone searching at midnight for “view FTP in browser” should land on a page that respects their time.
What still holds
Tools change; the habit of building in public does not. The useful part of these experiments was never the star count—it was learning to finish something small, name it, and let the next developer find it without a sales deck. That posture travels with you into enterprise work: fewer demos, more systems that still make sense six months later.