Pure-FTPd is a free (BSD), secure, production-quality and standard-conformant FTP server. It doesn’t provide useless bells and whistles, but focuses on efficiency and ease of use. It provides simple answers to common needs, plus unique useful features for personal users as well as hosting providers.

The following howto is aimed at installing and configuring a FTP-server, based on Pure-FTPd, which supports virtual user.

Install Pure-FTPd:

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aptitude update ; aptitude install pure-ftpd
groupadd ftpgroup
useradd -g ftpgroup -d /dev/null -s /etc ftpuser

Create user:
Create our first FTP user. In this example our user will be “zeldor”:

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pure-pw useradd zeldor -u ftpuser -g ftpgroup -d /home/pubftp/zeldor -N 10

In the command above, we gave zeldor a limit of 10 MB disk space with option “-N 10”

By default all users will be saved in “/etc/pure-ftpd/pureftpd.passwd”, but first we have to update the pure-ftpd Database:

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pure-pw mkdb

This database is only a binary file but it is ordered and has an index for quick access.

Get user information:
Show all available user and their home directories.

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pure-pw list

Get information for a specific user:

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pure-pw show zeldor

Reset password for a specific user (don’t forget to update your database):

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pure-pw passwd zeldor
pure-pw mkdb

Configuration:

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vim /etc/default/pure-ftpd-common
STANDALONE_OR_INETD=standalone

Server type should be standalone.

Use user database:

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cd /etc/pure-ftpd/auth
ln -s /etc/pure-ftpd/conf/PureDB 50pure

Restart and enjoy :)

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/etc/init.d/pure-ftpd restart