How to get local users to work with chroot on VSFtpd

First, yes FTP (not SFTP, really FTP) is an old protocol, but there are still people asking for it. So, let's give them.

The target is to give them FTP access.

Install VSFtpd

As I use Archlinux, this is done with:

pacman -S vsftpd

Say you want to create "foo" user.

There is nothing difficult about that. Default HOME for the user will be "/home/foo". Don't forget to setup a password.

Create a directory named "input" (may be any name you want) inside the HOME.

mkdir -pv /home/foo/input

From here, the created user may connect via SSH (not yet FTP), and may get through the entire filesystem...

This is not what you want, so disable SSH Password authentication in "/etc/ssh/sshd_config"

Be careful, you must then enable and setup key authentication, or you will be locked out!

VSFtpd will refuse to start if the FTP root directory is writable by the user "foo".

As we will chroot "foo", the FTP root directory for "foo" user is "/home/foo".

Make "/home/foo" owned by "ftp":

  chown -R ftp.ftp /home/foo

Then make "/home/foo/input" owned by "foo":

  chown -R foo.foo /home/foo/input

Note that through FTP, the user will only be able to write in "/home/foo/input"

Configuring VSFtpd is all about a few lines to change:

  local_enable=YES
  guest_enable=NO
  write_enable=YES
  local_umask=022
  chroot_local_user=YES
  seccomp_sandbox=NO

Restart NSFtpd and you're done