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WordPress 3.0 & SFTP

WordPress 3.0 has a nice feature that does all the platform and plugin updating for you by just clicking an 'Update' button at the admin console. In order to do so it needs to connect to the server the blog is hosted. By the default configuration of my (and I guess almost any) server only FTP and FTPS (FTP via SSL) are available here. Since my server doesn't run a FTP server module for security reasons I looked for a way to teach SFTP (kinda FTP tunneled via SSH) to the platform and stumbled over a blog post by Raditha Dissanayake from June 2009 that described the required procedure for a Fedora box. Since I'm running Ubuntu Hardy Heron LTS I'll sum up what I had to do on that specific system:

aptitude install libssh2-1-dev php-pear php5-dev
pecl install -f ssh2
echo "extension=ssh2.so" > /etc/php5/conf.d/ssh2.ini
/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

This procedure will enable the SSH2 extension for PHP. Afterwards there will immediately be a 'SSH2' option beside FTP and FTPS located in WordPress' update dialog.