Installing and Configuring Pure-FTPD on CentOS 7

Pure-FTPd is a free (BSD license) FTP Server with a strong focus on software security. It can be compiled and run on a variety of Unix-like computer operating systems including Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, Solaris, Tru64, Darwin, Irix and HP-UX. It has also been ported to Android.

Install Pure-FTPD

You can directly install Pure-FTPD using yum command:

yum install pure-ftpd

– Configuring Pure-FTPd

The configuration files for pure-ftpd are located in the file /etc/pure-ftpd/pure-ftpd.conf. So the first thing we’re going to do is to edit it using the command:

vi /etc/pure-ftpd/pure-ftpd.conf

And modify the following:

• Comment the line PAMAuthentication yes
• Enable the PureDB functionality by uncomment the line PureDB
• Change the value for NoAnonymous to yes

– Start Pure-FTPd as a service

To start Pure-FTPd, use the command:

systemctl start pure-ftpd

Then, enable the Pure-FTPd service:

systemctl enable pure-ftpd

Create a new ftp user account

In order to create FTP user account “virtual user” we need to walk through the following steps:

– Adding a “Default” User and Group

For smooth functioning, Pure-FTPd requires you to create a default user and group with no special permissions or even a password. We’re going to call this “pureftpuser” and “pureftpgroup.” Here are the commands:

Create a default group:

groupadd pureftpgroup

Create a default user:

useradd -g pureftpgroup pureftpuser

Now we have a user called “pureftpuser” belonging to the group “pureftpgroup.”

– Create virtual user

1. To create a virtual user, we only need a name for that virtual user like testftpuser.
2. Assigned this virtual user to the “pureftpuser” system account we created earlier.
3. And, assign a folder like “/home/www/domain.com” as their root directory.

pure-pw useradd testftpuser -u pureftpuser -d /home/www/domain.com

You’ll be asked for a password, and it’s confirmation.

– Set the folder permission

Make sure the folder is created, and give our user/group ownership permissions:

chown -R pureftpuser.pureftpgroup /home/www/domain.com

– Rebuild the puredb

Once the virtual user has been created, we need to rebuild the puredb using the following command:

pure-pw mkdb

– Access the FTP account

you can access your new FTP account using the following:

• Host: your_up_address
• UserName: testftpuser
• Password: testftpuser_password