Install an FTP Server With ProFTPd on CentOS 6 or CentOS 7

In this guide, we will see how to configure an FTP server (ProFTPd) to transfer files between your PC and your server.

##Prerequisites

• A newly deployed Vultr CentOS server instance.
• A Sudo user.

##Installation

Update the system.

yum check-update

Official RHEL/CentOS 6/7 repositories do not provide any binary packages for ProFTPD Server, so you need to add extra package repositories on your system provided by EPEL 6/7 repo using one of the following commands.

CentOS 6:

sudo rpm -Uvh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

CentOS 7:

sudo rpm -Uvh http://ftp.astral.ro/mirrors/fedora/pub/epel/beta/7/x86_64/epel-release-7-0.2.noarch.rpm

Download all of the metadata for the currently enabled yum repos.

sudo yum makecache

Install proftpd.

sudo yum install proftpd

Install ftp.

sudo yum install ftp

###Configuration

Open the ProFTPd configuration file.

sudo nano /etc/proftpd.conf

The file will resemble the following text.

The file will resemble the following text.
# This is the ProFTPD configuration file
#
# See: http://www.proftpd.org/docs/directives/linked/by-name.html

# Server Config - config used for anything outside a <VirtualHost> or <Global> $
# See: http://www.proftpd.org/docs/howto/Vhost.html

ServerName                      "ProFTPD server"
ServerIdent                     on "FTP Server ready."
ServerAdmin                     root@localhost
DefaultServer                   on

# Cause every FTP user except adm to be chrooted into their home directory
# Aliasing /etc/security/pam_env.conf into the chroot allows pam_env to
# work at session-end time (http://bugzilla.redhat.com/477120)
VRootEngine                     on
DefaultRoot                     ~ !adm
VRootAlias                      /etc/security/pam_env.conf etc/security/pam_env$

# Use pam to authenticate (default) and be authoritative
AuthPAMConfig                   proftpd
AuthOrder                       mod_auth_pam.c* mod_auth_unix.c
# If you use NIS/YP/LDAP you may need to disable PersistentPasswd
#PersistentPasswd               off

# Don't do reverse DNS lookups (hangs on DNS problems)
UseReverseDNS                   off

# Set the user and group that the server runs as
User                            nobody
Group                           nobody

# To prevent DoS attacks, set the maximum number of child processes
# to 20.  If you need to allow more than 20 concurrent connections
# at once, simply increase this value.  Note that this ONLY works
# in standalone mode; in inetd mode you should use an inetd server
# that allows you to limit maximum number of processes per service
# (such as xinetd)
MaxInstances                    20
...

###Main configuration directives

• ServerName: Specifies the name of the FTP server. This name will be displayed when clients connect to the server.
• DefaultRoot: Controls the default root directory assigned to a user upon login.
• MaxInstances: The maximum number of simultaneous connections you want to allow on your FTP server.

Now, we have to change the ServerName.

ServerName : the name of your FTP server

Note: By default, someone who connects to the FTP server can access all of the server folders, so it's recommended to enable the option DefaultRoot.

DefaultRoot                     ~ !adm

After the configuration has been changed, restart the server.

sudo service proftpd restart

Note: If an error line is displayed as "unable to resolve host", be aware that it does not matter and you can ignore it.

##Add an FTP user

Add a user.

useradd --shell /bin/false myuser

Create the home directory of our user "myuser".

mkdir /home/myuser

Change the ownership of that directory to the user and group "myuser".

chown myuser:myuser /home/myuser/

Set a password for the user "myuser".

passwd myuser

Connect to your FTP server

• How To Connect To An FTP Server With FileZilla