Question
Fixing permission errors with vsftpd on Ubuntu
- Posted on September 25, 2014
Asked by mattandrews
Hi,
I’ve followed the steps to setup vsftpd on my Ubuntu 12.04 VPS and I can connect to the server with my specially-created FTP user. My issue is that I want that user to have access to /var/www/ (where I keep all my nginx sites). I can browse to that directory but can’t modify anything there – I see things like “550 Delete operation failed” when I try.
I think I could fix this by chown’ing the www directory for my FTP user, but is this a bad idea? I don’t know what permissions nginx expects on that folder – would this break things? Is there a better solution? I just want to be able to upload large files (MP3s etc) via FTP which can then be served on the web.
thanks! matt
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nginx needs read access only, so you can safely
chownthe directory to your FTP user. However, that won’t be as secure because your password is sent as plaintext over the internet when you use FTP – consider using SFTP instead :).If you’re running a web application that needs write access to a specific directory, you will need to change the said directory’s group ownership to
www-dataand set group write permissions:Holy moly… This is what I needed.