How To Install ProFTPD on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ProFTPD on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, ProFTPd is an open-source FTP server application that allows you to set up your own FTP servers on a Linux system. It stands out for being highly configurable and for having great documentation available for all users.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the ProFTPD on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: Ubuntu 20.04, 18.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint or elementary OS.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues.
• SSH access to the server (or just open Terminal if you’re on a desktop).
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install ProFTPD on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa

Step 1. First, make sure that all your system packages are up-to-date by running the following apt commands in the terminal.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Step 2. Installing ProFTPD on Ubuntu 20.04.

By default, ProFTPD is available on Ubuntu base repositories, Now we run the following command to install it:

sudo apt install proftpd

After installing, run the commands below that can be used to stop, start and enable the server service to always start up when the server boots:

sudo systemctl start proftpd
sudo systemctl enable proftpd

Step 3. Configuring ProFTPD.

The default configuration files of ProFTPD are available in the /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf directory. Before modifying it, it is convenient to make a backup of the original file that we can use if we have a problem later:

sudo cp /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf.bak
sudo nano /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf

Edit uncomment (specify the root directory for chroot):

# Use this to jail all users in their homes 
# DefaultRoot			~
DefaultRoot /home/Linux/Docs

You may change the setting according to your requirements:

• ServerName: You can change it as your default server name
• UseIPV6: You can disable it by changing it to off
• DefaultRoot: You can uncomment this line to restrict users with their home folders
• Port: You can run ProFTPD on a custom port by changing it this line
• SystemLog: The default location of the log file. You can change it as per your requirements

Step 4. Creating ProFTPD Users.

Let us now discuss the steps to create an FTP user “idroot-user” with the folder “/var/www/” as the home folder:

sudo useradd idroot-user
sudo passwd idroot-user

To change the home directory of the user, use:

sudo usermod -m -d /var/www/ idroot-user

Now, restart the PROFTPD service to apply the changes:

sudo systemctl restart proftpd

Step 5. Accessing the FTP server.

We are going to access ProFTPD through FileZilla from the Client system. Now we install FileZilla on your client system using the following command below:

sudo apt install filezilla

Now all you have to do is open an FTP client and connect to the server using its IP address, hostname, or domain name. If everything is configured correctly, you should be granted access to the server with the correct username and password.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed ProFTPD. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing ProFTPD on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official ProFTPD website.