Tutorial

How To Set Up ProFTPD on CentOS 6

Published on June 19, 2012
How To Set Up ProFTPD on CentOS 6

Status: Deprecated

This article covers a version of CentOS that is no longer supported. If you are currently operating a server running CentOS 6, we highly recommend upgrading or migrating to a supported version of CentOS.

Reason: CentOS 6 reached end of life (EOL) on November 30th, 2020 and no longer receives security patches or updates. For this reason, this guide is no longer maintained.

See Instead:
This guide might still be useful as a reference, but may not work on other CentOS releases. If available, we strongly recommend using a guide written for the version of CentOS you are using.

About ProFTPD

ProFTPD is a popular ftp server. Because it was written as a powerful and configurable program, it is not necessarily the lightest ftp server available.

Step One—Install ProFTPD

Before we do anything else, we need to download the EPEL repository which will allow us to install ProFTPD on our virtual private server with yum.

sudo rpm -Uvh http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-8.noarch.rpm

The next step is to install ProFTPD

sudo yum install proftpd

Finally, we must also download a ftp client, so that we can connect to an ftp server from the command line:

sudo yum install ftp

Once the files finish downloading, the ProFTPD server will be on your VPS. However, we still have to make a few changes to the configuration.

Step Two—Configure ProFTPD

Once ProFTPD is installed, you can make the needed adjustments in the configuration. Unlike some other ftp configurations, ProFTPD disables anonymous login from the outset and we only need to address a small change in the config file.

Open up the file:

sudo vi /etc/proftpd.conf

Go ahead and change the Server Name to your host name.

ServerName                      "example.com"

Save and Exit from that file.

Then, to prevent any issues, add your droplet name and IP address to the hosts file:

sudo vi /etc/hosts

The line can look something like this:

12.34.56.789 servername

Restart after you have made all of your changes:

sudo service proftpd restart

Step Three—Access the FTP server

<p?Once you have installed the FTP server and configured it to your liking, you can now access it.

You can reach an FTP server in the browser by typing the domain name into the address bar and logging in with the appropriate ID. Keep in mind, you will only be able to access the user's home directory.

ftp://example.com

Alternatively, you can reach the FTP server through the command line by typing:

 ftp example.com

Then you can use the word, "exit," to get out of the FTP shell.

By Etel Sverdlov

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Well, I’ve come up with an alternative process. Go here, http://repoforge.org/use/, and download the appropriate rpmforge-release package, then do rpm -Uvh rpmforge-release-0.5.2-2.el6.rf.x86_64.rpm.

Once I did this, yum installed proftpd-mysql without a problem.

how to edit a file in console ctrl E or something

I notice this thread is old. I have DO server on Centos 7 and wondering if there is a change or updated version of the FTP server software to install as this all relative to version 6. Can anybody help ? Also, I need this installed to get support for external extension and want to also know how this FTP works in principle when I install it. So I take when this FTP is installed on the server there is a password and user ID to give to the external support guys to install files ? Is this the jist of what I am doing. any help would be great.

Newby dude ;-)

i have one domain using SSL if i add another domain and add permission to FTP for new domain my SSL stop working. instead pointing to website domain SSL it’s point to Zpanel Administration site.

problem solved!

@Kamal Nasser ERROR:> [24/02/2014 12:51:36] The remote host actively refused the attempt to connect to it.

Kamal Nasser
DigitalOcean Employee
DigitalOcean Employee badge
February 22, 2014

@webgaha: What problem are you experiencing?

someone can help me? i create a user/passwd and set to the directory of the domain. I also put the user as owner and group of the directory! but, when i try to access for desktop/programFTP i received: STATUS:> [21/02/2014 13:31:56] Connecting to FTP server… ftp.xxx.com:21 (ip = 162.243.xxx.207

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