Install And Configure FTP Server On CentOS 7

VSFTPD(Very Secure File Transport Protocol Daemon) is a secure, fast FTP server for Unix/Linux systems. In this how-to article, let us see how to setup a basic FTP server on CentOS 7. However, this procedure might work well on RHEL CentOS, Scientific Linux 7 version too.

Install vsftpd

All commands should be run with ‘root’ user. Run the following command in terminal to install vsftpd package:

yum install vsftpd ftp -y

Edit vsftpd configuration file /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf,

vi /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf

Find the following lines and make the changes as shown below:

[...] ## Disable anonymous login ## anonymous_enable=NO
## Uncomment ##
 ascii_upload_enable=YES
ascii_download_enable=YES
 ## Uncomment - Enter your Welcome message - This is optional ##
 ftpd_banner=Welcome to UNIXMEN FTP service. ## Add at the end of this  file ##
 use_localtime=YES

Enable and start the vsftpd service:

systemctl enable vsftpd systemctl start vsftpd

Firewall And SELinux Configuration

Allow the ftp service and port 21 via firewall.

firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=21/tcp
 firewall-cmd --permanent --add-service=ftp

Restart firewall:

firewall-cmd --reload

Then, update the SELinux boolean values for FTP service:

setsebool -P ftp_home_dir on

Create FTP users

By default, root user is not allowed to login to ftp server for security purpose. So, let us create a normal testing user called “sk” with password “centos”.

useradd sk passwd sk

Connecting to FTP server

Now, try to connect to FTP server itself with user “sk”:

ftp ipaddress

Enter the ftp user name and password.

Sample Output:

Connected to 192.168.1.101 (192.168.1.101). 220 Welcome to ftp service. Name (192.168.1.101:root): sk 331 Please specify the password. Password: 230 Login successful. Remote system type is UNIX. Using binary mode to transfer files. ftp>

Congratulations!! you will be able to login to FTP server without any problems.