Limit FTP access only to the /var/www with vsftpd

Question

I am running vsftpd as ftp server on my linux (rasbian), I log in to the machine as a root user.

I would like to be still locked to using only /var/www, how can I configure vsftpd conf to accomplish it?

Answer 1

Method 1: Changing the user's home directory

Make sure the following line exists

chroot_local_user=YES

Set user HOME Directory to /var/www/ , if you want to change for existing user then you can use:

usermod --home /var/www/ username

then set required permission on /var/www/

Method 2: Use user_sub_token

If you don't want to change user's Home directory then you can use:

chroot_local_user=YES
local_root=/ftphome/$USER
user_sub_token=$USER

About user_sub_token:

Automatically generate a home directory for each virtual user, based on a template. For example, if the home directory of the real user specified via guest_username is /ftphome/$USER, and user_sub_token is set to $USER, then when virtual user test logs in, he will end up (usually chroot()'ed) in the directory /ftphome/test. This option also takes affect if local_root contains user_sub_token.

Create directory and set up permissions:

mkdir -p /ftphome/{test,user1,user2}
chmod 770 -R /ftphome
chown -R ftp. /ftphome
usermod -G ftp test

Once restart vsftpd and test your setup.

Sample success output:

[root@mail tmp]# ftp localhost
Connected to mail.linuxian.local.
220 (vsFTPd 2.0.5)
530 Please login with USER and PASS.
530 Please login with USER and PASS.
KERBEROS_V4 rejected as an authentication type
Name (localhost:root): test
331 Please specify the password.
Password:
230 Login successful.
Remote system type is UNIX.
Using binary mode to transfer files.
ftp> mput vhosts
mput vhosts? 
227 Entering Passive Mode (127,0,0,1,146,41)
150 Ok to send data.
226 File receive OK.
24 bytes sent in 3.3e-05 seconds (7.1e+02 Kbytes/s)
ftp> ls -rlt
227 Entering Passive Mode (127,0,0,1,97,90)
150 Here comes the directory listing.
-rw-r--r--    1 787      787            24 Oct 11 19:57 vhosts
226 Directory send OK.
ftp> 221 Goodbye.

Answer 2

You can do this:

usermod --home /var/www/ username

Answer 3

I used Rahul Patil's suggestion above:

chroot_local_user=YES
local_root=/home/$USER/www-data
user_sub_token=$USER

But I couldn't understand why I was only able to log in with one user. Then I found that we couldn't chroot to a root directory (for this case, /home/$USER/www-data) that have a write access. So I remove the write access with:

# chmod a-w /home/$USER/www-data

NOTE: change $USER with your user.

Answer 4

Check the chrootoptions in vsftpd.conf and create a separate user for it whose homedir is set to /var/www.