Can't get SFTP to work in PHP

When connecting to a SFTP server and you need to connect to the root folder (for instance for reading the content of the folder) you would still get the error when using just "/" as the path.

The solution that I found was to use the path "/./", that's a valid path that references to the root folder. This is useful when the user you are logging with has access only to its own root folder and no full path is available.

So the request to the server when trying to read the contents of the root folder should be something like this:

$rd = "ssh2.sftp://{$this->sftp}/./";

For php versions > 5.6.27 use intval()

$sftpConnection = ssh2_connect($host);
$sftp = ssh2_sftp($sftpConnection);
$fp = fopen("ssh2.sftp://" . intval($sftp) . $remoteFile, "r");

https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=73597

I'm having a similar issue. I assume you are doing something similar to this:

    $dir = "ssh2.sftp://{$sftp}{$remote_dir}"; 
    $handle = opendir($dir);

When $remote_dir is the full path from root then open_dir works. If $remote_dir is just '/' or '', then I get the 'unable to open' error as you did.

In my case, it seems ssh connects at the root folder instead of the 'home' directory as ftp does. You mentioned that it worked on a different server, so I wonder if it is just a config issue.