How to configure Filezilla FTP server

Hello,

In the previous article, we have installed Filezilla FTP server. In the current post, we will explain how to configure Filezilla FTP server for basic functionality.

For Filezilla FTP server to work, all what you need to do is to only add a user, and assign the appropriate permissions on the specific directories.

First open, the filezilla FTP Server Admin interface:

To add a user, we click on the "Edit" Menu, then click on "Users"

Then the users Tab will open. As we can see our users list is empty

In order to add a new user, we have to click on the button "Add". So we get a new window "Add user account". We type the username that we want, we have used "testuser" as username in this example. Notice that currently we don't have any group. So the user will not be member of any group. 

After we entered the username we want, we click on ok, and the user will be created and enabled as you can see in the screenshot below

The next step is to set the password for this user, so we click on the checkbox near "Password" and we enter the Password for this user.  In this example, we entered "Password123"

Then, we have to assign this user specific directory, and configure the appropriate permissions for him. So in the list on the left, we click on "Shared folders". Then we add a specific directory by clicking on the "Add" button. 

After we click on the "Add" , we have to select the folder we want. The folder has to be created before on our PC (example we created a directory called "FTPStorage" in "C:\_Labs"

After we select the folder that we want we click on OK, the folder will appear in the "Directories" List. The Last step that we have is to assign the user the appropriate permissions. In this example, we will allow the user to read/write files and to list directories and sub directories. We will not allow the user to create directories, or to delete them, neither to delete files or to Append to files.

After we are done with the permissions, we click on OK.

Note: You can create more than one directory for a user. But only one directory will be his default directory. The default directory is the directory the user reach it immediately after logging-in to the FTP. To set the home directory, you can use the button "Set as home dir". The directory is the one

If you have one directory only then it will be the default directory. (as our case now). 

In case you have more than one directory, the default directory is the one that has the letter "H" in Bold in the begining. Look at the screenshot below. The default directory is the second one in the list because it has the letter H

Now as we have created a username for our FTP server, we will test the access. You can use windows explorer, or command line, or also you can use an FTP client, such as Filezilla FTP client.

We will first use windows explorer. 

To use your FTP server, you must know where to connect, so you need the "Fully qualified domain name" or the "IP address" of your server. To get the IP address in windows, type "ipconfig" in the command prompt. Here the screenshot below

As we see, our "IP address" is 169.254.42.64". We open "My Computer", and we we type  on top "ftp://168.254.42.64", then we press enter. we will prompted to enter a username and password for our FTP server

So we enter the username we have created "testuser" and the password "Password123", then we press Logon

After we press on "Log On", we will be in the home directory of the testuser.

As for a test, we did two things:

First we have tried to create a new directory in the FTP window, we got an error that we don't have enough permissions

second we have tried to copy a file somewhere in our PC to the FTP window, the copy was successfull

To confirm more our success and error, we can look at the logs in the Admin interface of Filezilla.

We can see in the begining, that the user was able to login successfully. But when he tried to create a directory, he was not allowed, because of permission denied. We can also at the end, that the user was able to successfully transfter a file to the FTP server.

To logout from the FTP with windows explorer, all what we have to do is to close the window

To login from the command line,

• we have to type "ftp 169.254.42.64"
• we will be prompted for username and password,
• after properly entering the username and password, our login will succeed.
• We will explain in future articles about commands in FTP command line interface.
• To logout from the FTP, we need to type "bye" and press enter

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I hope this was helpful and I would like to thank you for reading