multiple ftp user sharing common home directory

Question

I want to setup like mentioned, where I can create multiple ftp users with having same home directory.

What I have tried so far,

Created new user with pointing to the directory of ftp user as home, but as new user is not owner of that directory connection is refusing I guess.

I have also tried to mange this using soft link, like I have created soft link of original ftp directory and mapped that links as home of individual user's home directory.

I know if I create all home directory separately for all ftp users then this will work, right now my FTP user and apache user both are same, so file I am uploading apache get its execution permission by default, but if I separate out users and if I will uploading file using another user which is not mapped with apache, will apache able to execute that file?

Answer 1

I’m not sure what you mean by "will apache able to execute that file". Do you really want to execute (i.e. run as a program) files that are uploaded by ftp? Or do you mean you just want apache to serve them as data to clients? What directories web clients can see is determined by the apache configuration file; you can set that up to serve whatever directories you want.

Typically, new files are created with read access for all and write access only for the owner: i.e. -rwxr-xr-x or 755 octal (-rw-r--r-- or 644 octal if not an executable file). The permissions given to new files is governed by the umask of the process creating them. This means that files uploaded by the ftp user probably are usable by apache, if it is configured to do so.

If you really want multiple users to share a home directory, that directory needs to be writable by all those users, so either it needs to have global write permission or group write permission, and all the users that need to write into it belonging to the group that owns it.

But that probably isn't the way to go. You probably will get what you want using separate users.