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[[https://faun.pub/how-to-configure-ftp-access-to-specific-folder-on-linux-server-1626a949c9da|
How to configure FTP access to specific folder on Linux server]]

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How to configure FTP access to specific folder on Linux server
Michael Radionov
FAUN — Developer Community 🐾
Michael Radionov

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Published in
FAUN — Developer Community 🐾

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3 min read
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Dec 29, 2019
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If you want to give somebody access to some certain folder on your Linux server then you came to the right place. I’ve been digging through a number of tutorials but didn’t find one that works for me from end to end. So I decided to make this tutorial for me, my colleagues and everybody else.

First of all, I use Hetzner’s VPS with Ubuntu 16.04 on board. I almost sure this approach is fair for most of popular Linux distributives.

1. Create a user
Be careful here because you are creating credentials for your FTP account. Use something appropriate :)

useradd -d <ftp_path> -p <ftp_password>  -s /usr/sbin/nologin <ftp_login> 
Part -s /usr/sbin/nologin here is for locking FTP user from accessing server by SSH.

Now check that user is actually been created:

cat /etc/passwd | grep <ftp_login>
You should see something like

your_user_name:1000:1000::/path/to/shared/folder:/usr/sbin/nologin
2. Install vsftp (Very Secure FTP)
apt install -y vsftpd
Check that vsftp is running:

service --status-all | grep vsftpd
3. Check if 21 port is open
telnet <server_ip> 21 
You can run this command either from your remote server both from your local computer. So if you don’t have telnet locally, you can execute telnet localhost 21 on your server.

If everything is ok telnet must “hang”. If it does you probably can exit from it by pressing ctrl+enter.

If telnet couldn’t connect to 21 port you should check your firewall rules with ufw status and iptables -L . A little help with configuring theese firewalls can be found here for ufw and here for iptables.

4. Configure vsftp
First, append this at the end of /etc/vsftpd.conf file:

listen=YES
listen_ipv6=NO
anonymous_enable=NO
local_enable=YES
write_enable=YES
chroot_local_user=YES
allow_writeable_chroot=YES
force_dot_files=YES
pam_service_name=ftp

userlist_deny=NO
userlist_enable=YES
userlist_file=/etc/vsftpd.userlist

local_umask=0000
file_open_mode=0777
Then, create /etc/vsftpd.userlist file and put FTP username there:

echo <ftp_login> >> /etc/vsftpd.userlist
5. Restart vsftpd (vsftp daemon)
service vsftpd restart
6. Set correct folders permissions
The only option that I figured out trying to make this work is setting 755 permissions on every folder in path to your shared folder. But please don’t do it recursively except you are totally sure that you need it!

For example, if you have path like /root/domain.ru/shared/your_directory then you need to execute this

chmod 755 /root/
chmod 755 /root/domain.ru/
chmod 755 /root/domain.ru/shared
chmod 755 /root/domain.ru/shared/your_directory
7. Done
You should be all set. Try to connect with your favorite FTP-client. Mine is Transmit (Mac OS only). Hope this tutorial will help you. If not please hit me in the comments, I’ll try to reply as fast as I can. ✌️

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