Dreamweaver Site Manager: Symbolic Link Handling During Sync

Short answer

Dreamweaver's Site Manager has no documented setting for symbolic links, and Adobe does not publish official behavior for them. Based on commonly reported behavior (which you should verify on your own version), the practical rule is: a symlink whose target lives inside the local site root is resolved and uploaded as a regular file; a symlink pointing outside the site root is typically skipped silently. The remote server never receives a real symlink — Dreamweaver's sync transfers file content, not link semantics.

Likely explanation vs. confirmed facts

Confirmed by inspection: Dreamweaver's synchronization compares local and remote files and transfers content over FTP/SFTP. Those protocols, as Dreamweaver uses them, carry file bytes — there is no mechanism in the standard sync flow to recreate a symlink on the remote host.

Likely, but undocumented: internal symlinks are dereferenced during the local file scan, so the target's content is uploaded under the link's path. External symlinks fall outside the site definition and are ignored, often without an error in the sync log. This matches your observation that external links leave the remote without the expected reference.

Is there a setting?

No. There is no preference, site option, or configuration file entry in Dreamweaver to preserve symlinks or to force dereferencing. If your workflow depends on shared assets living outside the site root, the reliable options are:

• Move the shared assets inside the site root (or copy them in as part of a build step).
• Deploy with a tool that handles links explicitly — e.g., rsync -L to dereference, or rsync -l to preserve links — instead of Dreamweaver sync.
• Upload the shared assets once as a separate folder and reference them by absolute path or URL.

OS differences

The reported behavior is broadly the same on Windows and macOS: internal links upload as files, external links are skipped. Two caveats: Windows symlinks require specific privileges or Developer Mode to create, and Dreamweaver's handling of Windows junctions versus true symlinks may differ. Dreamweaver does not run natively on Linux, so Linux behavior is only relevant if the remote server is Linux — and there, what matters is that the uploaded copy is a plain file, which is fine for web serving.

Verify on your version

Because this behavior is undocumented and may vary between Dreamweaver CC releases, confirm it directly:

1. Create a symlink inside the site root pointing to another file inside the root, sync, and check the remote: it should exist as a regular file with the target's content.
2. Create a symlink pointing outside the site root, sync, and inspect the sync log (the FTP log panel) for a skip or silent omission.

If the external-link case matters to your setup, the one detail worth checking is whether your Dreamweaver version logs anything at all for skipped links — that determines whether you can detect the omission automatically or must audit the remote manually.