CHIRPS not available via FTP

[barryrowlingson]

CHIRPS data seems to only be available via HTTPS now - the IP address for FTP, as coded into the serverPath function is not in the DNS any more, and the CHIRPS page only lists HTTPS sources:

https://www.chc.ucsb.edu/data/chirps

replacing the FTP url in that function with one based on the HTTPS server, https://data.chc.ucsb.edu/products/CHIRPS-2.0/ fails because (I think) the code expects a simple FTP directory listing and this returns an HTML table.

This all kicked off from a StackOverflow question here which I tried to answer...

https://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/382700/downloading-chirps-data-sets

[fdetsch]

Thanks for error analysis. Unfortunately, nothing has happened on this project in quite a long time. This will likely not change in the near term, so users are probably best advised to rely on actively maintained CHIRPS packages as eg. suggested by Jeffrey Evans on SO for the time being.

[jonas-v-l]

I encountered the same problem, but a solution that worked for me was typing the following

trace(heavyRain:::serverPath, edit = T)

At the place where you find the outdated link, you replace it with ftp://ftp.chc.ucsb.edu/pub/org/chc/products/CHIRPS-
This worked for me, I hope it works for you too.

@fdetsch : Is it possible to change this in the source code of the serverPath function, if you would have time for this? I used your package already many times and I really appreciate the efforts you made to easily download rainfall data! I guess it can still be very useful for many people if the link is changed.

[fdetsch]

@jonas-v-l Would you be willing to create a PR?

[jonas-v-l]

@fdetsch If I understood well how to do it (I'm fresh to GitHub), there should be a PR