How to install an FTP server on CentOS 7

In this tutorial we are going to show you how to install an FTP server on  CentOS 7 as an operating system.

1.  Connect via SSH and update all system packages

First of all, connect to your server via SSH and make sure that all the system software is up to date. To update the software installed on your server you can use the command:

sudo yum -y update

2. Enable the EPEL repository

The next thing you need to do is to enable the EPEL repository. It is a repository that allows you to install a lot of open source packages on your server using the yum package manager. One of them is ProFTPD. ProFTPD is highly configurable GPL-licensed FTP server software. It is simple, secure, easy to configure and provides features like permission-based directory visibility, support for multiple ‘virtual’ FTP servers, anonymous FTP etc. We will use ProFTPD in this tutorial.

sudo wget https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/7/x86_64/Packages/e/epel-release-7-11.noarch.rpm
sudo rpm -ivh epel-release-7-11.noarch.rpm

Check if the repo is enabled on your system:

sudo yum repolist | grep epel

If you get something like the following, you are good to go:

sudo yum repolist | grep epel
*epel/x86_64         Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 7 - x86_64       10,133

3. Install the required packages

Next, go ahead and install the required packages using the command below:

sudo yum install proftpd proftpd-utils

4. Start the ProFTPD service

Start the ProFTPD service and enable it on system boot by using the following commands:

sudo systemctl start proftpd
sudo systemctl enable proftpd

5. Verify ProFTPD  installation on CentOS

At this point you are ready to use the ProFTPD service on your CentOS VPS. To upload or download files, you can use your favorite FTP client. As username and password you can use any system user that exists on your server. Alternatively, you can access your FTP server using a web browser. Open your favorite web browser and enter the following:

ftp://111.111.111.111

For demonstrative purposes we used 111.111.111.111. You should either use your server IP address or a domain name which points to your server IP address.

If you like to take full advantage of the ProFTPD’s functionality, you can tweak the default settings. The default configuration file of the service is /etc/proftpd.conf. The configuration file has Apache-like syntax and description for all the settings. To learn more you can visit http://www.proftpd.org/docs/ where you can find the official project documentation.

6. Restart Service

Once you make changes you need to restart the service so the changes can take effect. To restart the service you can use the following command:

sudo systemctl restart proftpd

7.  Check the log files

ProFTPD logs many activities so if you like to investigate or debug some problem, you can check the log files which are stored in the /var/log/proftpd/ directory. Also, if you experience problems with the service, you an use the following command to get more details:

sudo systemctl status proftpd

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