Debian – Create FTP accounts with access to just some folders in the web directory

apache-2.2debianftpvps

I own a VPS server. At the moment I havent installed any FTP server on it, I am using SSH and SFTP only. I am using Debian 6 Squeeze and Apache2 service. The web directory is in /var/www/

Well, I wanted to create different FTP accounts and give access to some people to them (one account per user). In my web directory I have an structure like this:

/var/www/mtaplugins/music/mplayer/music/
/var/www/mapuploader/
and more folders inside. I want to create an FTP account which should be able to just access one of those folders and the folders inside them.

I would appreciate some recomendations or stept to follow before installing anything or doing anythong, because I dont have any idea about this.

I was thinking in using ProFTPd but as I saw in the documentation it would just create an account for each user in my server, and I want to not create more users (I always use root)

Thanks in advance

Best Answer

In this situation, you may install vsftpd and make settings that allow access via ftp for system users to his home directory that will be /var/www/mapuploader/USER1, /var/www/mapuploader/USER2, /var/www/mapuploader/USERN.

So. For Example:

useradd -d /var/www/mapuploader/userN -m -s /bin/bash userN

After this step you'll have a user acoount with the home dir as /var/www/mapuploader/user1, but you need to set the password for this user:

passwd userN

Ans type and re-type the new password, that you should use later to login via ftp. Now install vsftpd

apt-get install vsftpd

And add some changes to the default config file

nano /etc/vsftpd.conf

There you need to set some values for several variables:

anonymous_enable=NO

local_enable=YES

write_enable=YES

local_umask=022

chroot_local_user=YES

And the other variables do not touch. Save changes.

Now you need to restart vsftd to re-read the config file:

/etc/init.d/vsftpd restart

Now your system users can access your home directory via ftp.

Related Solutions

Ftp – Using wget to recursively download whole FTP directories

Try -m for --mirror

wget -m ftp://username:password@ip.of.old.host

Linux – Setting Up FTP user accounts on Debian

ProFTPd does support the concept of FTP-only users. In order to make this work, you would need to first make the following changes to your proftpd.conf file:

AuthOrder mod_auth_unix.c mod_auth_file.c #add mod_auth_file.c
AuthUserFile /etc/proftpd/ftpasswd #Add this entire line

Make sure that the file /etc/proftpd/ftpasswd exists and is readable by the user that the proftpd daemon runs under.

In addition, you would need to add the following lines:

RequireValidShell off  
UseFtpUsers off

Restart the ProFTPd daemon. Your FTP service will now allow connections from FTP-only accounts. You can create your FTP-only account using the following syntax:

ftpasswd --passwd --file=/etc/proftpd/ftpasswd --name=ftpuser --uid=5001 --gid=5001 --home=/var/www/beanstalkapp --shell=/bin/false

Pay close attention to the options "--uid" and "--gid". If you supply a numeric value here that does not correspond to any existing user/group, the FTP user will have the same file permissions that the user running the proftpd daemon has (typically read-only access to most directories). If you wanted to allow the FTP user to be able to actually overwrite the files, set the uid to match the UID of the actual system user which owns the directory (Something I found out from another SF Question).

For additional security, you could also add the following lines to your proftpd.conf file:

<Directory "/var/www/beanstalkapp">
DirFakeUser on ~
DirFakeGroup on ~
</Directory>

This will trick the FTP client into showing the files as if owned by the FTP-user/FTP-group in the FTP User's root directory.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ftp – Using wget to recursively download whole FTP directories

Linux – Setting Up FTP user accounts on Debian

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