Ubuntu – How to create a user for ftp server

I'm going to recommend PureFTPD because it's been the simplest and easiest to use in my opinion. You'll need to install it first: sudo apt-get install pure-ftpd once it's installed it'll start itself up. By default it uses PAM Authentications - meaning it uses the accounts which already exist on the system for it's auth. All you'll need to do is create a user account with the home directory being your www path and set the password for that account. You should then be able to connect with that user/pass combination to upload/download files.

Something like this:

sudo adduser ftpman --home /var/www/ --ingroup www-data

Which will create the ftpman user and put him in the www-data group which Apache uses and will walk you through the rest of the setup script. Once that's defined make sure to chmod the WWW folder if you get errors about it already existing to the user/group combination you created.

Lastly if you want to lock down SSH access for that account run: sudo chsh -s /bin/false ftpman which will change that users shell to false. (Replace ftpman with your ftp user)

You just have to modify the startup call for vsftpd. The user_config_dir argument will tell the server to look for a configuration in the directory /etc/vsftpd_user_conf/luis if the user luis logs in. Analogously with any other user that logs in. I guess that if no configuration file is found the server will fallback to the default one.

Anyway, take a quick read at this manual page (which you can access too from the terminal with man vsftpd) : http://vsftpd.beasts.org/vsftpd_conf.html

This other guide can help you with using custom directories for your server: http://gofedora.com/how-to-configure-secure-ftp-server-vsftpd/