Raspberry FTP Server

FTP Server Installation

We are close to having all the things for a good web server. Now we need to install FTP. I used ProFTPD for FTP.

sudo apt-get install proftpd

This will ask you to choose init.d or standalone, choose any one of them but I used standalone for this tutorial.

Next, we are going to change the config of proftpd.

sudo nano /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf

You need to change the following lines. The ServerName should be the IP of your Raspberry Pi. Here we used 192.168.1.88. Yours can be different.

Server Name "192.168.1.88"

Uncomment the # in front of DefaultRoot text. This is a good practice.

# Use this to jail all users in their homes
 DefaultRoot

Next, we restart proftpd service

sudo service proftpd restart

To make sure that FTP service runs automatically at startup, enter the following code

update-rc.d proftpd defaults

Now we need to add a user for FTP. I am using “real” as the username. You can choose anything you like.

sudo useradd real

Set password the user with the following command

sudo passwd real

Assign the “/var/www/html/” directory to the user. This is the directory where the files will need to be added and the user will see this directory when they login using FTP client.Ignore message that says the directory already exists

sudo usermod -m -d /var/www/html real

Run the following commands to give permissions to the user on the html folder.

cd /var/www
sudo chown real:real -R html

FTP setup is done at this point. However, I found it is easier for me to do one extra step to avoid permissions. I edited apache2.conf file to make Apache use the user and group that we created.

sudo nano /etc/apache2/apache2.conf

Look for the following line and add # in front of User and Group lines. After editing, it should look like the following

# These need to be set in /etc/apache2/envvars
# User ${APACHE_RUN_USER}
# Group ${APACHE_RUN_GROUP}
User real
Group real