FTP is the best way to transfer (read upload) files to the web servers from our PC. FTP stands for File
Transfer Protocol. It’s very unlikely that you haven’t heard about FTP servers yet. In case you really
haven’t, FTP on Wikipedia.
If you are using a shared host, you probably already have FTP server installed and
ready for access. But if you are using a dedicated server, you shall have to install FTP server
and configure it yourself before you can start uploading files using a FTP client like Filezilla. In this
post, we are going to see how we can easily install a FTP server on a Ubuntu machine.
We shall use the “vsftpd” server as it is very easy to setup and configure. Use the following command to
install it on a Ubuntu machine:
sudo apt-get install vsftpd
Like most other services on a Ubuntu machine, the configuration data is stored in “/etc/vsftpd.conf” file.
Before we start the service, let’s modify the configuration file to customize the server behaviour a bit.
Before editing the file, please make a backup of the original content. Use the following command:
sudo cp /etc/vsftpd.conf /etc/vsftpd_conf_orig.bkp
Now let’s edit the file and make the changes. To edit the file, we shall use the nano text editor:
sudo nano /etc/vsftpd.conf
Please note that nano is the most user friendly text editor on the terminal. If you don’t have it, please
use this command to install it first:
sudo apt-get install nano
Here’s a sample of custom configuration you might want to use:
listen=YES anonymous_enable=YES write_enable=YES local_umask=022 anon_upload_enable=YES anon_mkdir_write_enable=YES xferlog_enable=YES chown_uploads=YES chown_username=masnun ftpd_banner=Welcome to the FTP service. chroot_local_user=NO secure_chroot_dir=/var/run/vsftpd pam_service_name=vsftpd
Leave the other options unchanged. After the configuration is done, let’s start the server:
sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd start
You can stop it with this command:
sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd stop
And restart using:
sudo /etc/init.d/vsftpd restart
