Upload files using SFTP in Python, but create directories if path doesn’t exist

SFTP supports the usual FTP commands (chdir, mkdir, etc…), so use those:

sftp = paramiko.SFTPClient.from_transport(transport)
try:
    sftp.chdir(remote_path)  # Test if remote_path exists
except IOError:
    sftp.mkdir(remote_path)  # Create remote_path
    sftp.chdir(remote_path)
sftp.put(local_path, '.')    # At this point, you are in remote_path in either case
sftp.close()

To fully emulate mkdir -p, you can work through remote_path recursively:

import os.path

def mkdir_p(sftp, remote_directory):
    """Change to this directory, recursively making new folders if needed.
    Returns True if any folders were created."""
    if remote_directory == "https://stackoverflow.com/":
        # absolute path so change directory to root
        sftp.chdir("https://stackoverflow.com/")
        return
    if remote_directory == '':
        # top-level relative directory must exist
        return
    try:
        sftp.chdir(remote_directory) # sub-directory exists
    except IOError:
        dirname, basename = os.path.split(remote_directory.rstrip("https://stackoverflow.com/"))
        mkdir_p(sftp, dirname) # make parent directories
        sftp.mkdir(basename) # sub-directory missing, so created it
        sftp.chdir(basename)
        return True

sftp = paramiko.SFTPClient.from_transport(transport)
mkdir_p(sftp, remote_path) 
sftp.put(local_path, '.')    # At this point, you are in remote_path
sftp.close()

Of course, if remote_path also contains a remote file name, then it needs to be split off, the directory being passed to mkdir_p and the filename used instead of ‘.’ in sftp.put.