I am writing a simple SFTP client in PHP because we have the need to programatically retrieve files via n remote servers. I am using the PECL SSH2 extension.

I have run up against a road block, though. The documentation on php.net suggests that you can do this:

$stream = fopen("ssh2.sftp://$sftp/path/to/file", 'r');

However, I have an ls method that attempts to something similar

public function ls($dir)
{
    $rd = "ssh2.sftp://{$this->sftp}/$dir";
    $handle = opendir($rd);
    if (!is_resource($handle)) {
        throw new SFTPException("Could not open directory.");
    }

    while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) {
        if (substr($file, 0, 1) != '.'){
            print $file . "\n";
        }
    }
    closedir($handle);
}

I get the following error:

PHP Warning:  opendir(): Unable to open ssh2.sftp://Resource id #5/outgoing on remote host

This makes perfect sense because that's what happens when you cast a resource to string. Is the documentation wrong? I tried replacing the resource with host, username, and host and that didn't work either. I know the path is correct because I can run SFTP from the command line and it works fine.

Has anyone else tried to use the SSH2 extenstion with SFTP? Am I missing something obvious here?

UPDATE:

I setup sftp on another machine in-house and it works just fine. So, there must be something about the server I am trying to connect to that isn't working.