Many webmasters allow FTP access to their servers. FTP provides additional service especially for those running websites and blogs online.

You can quickly download and upload content to your web servers using FTP services then most networked protocols. Besides downloading and uploading content, you can also manage files and folders on your web servers directly from an FTP client.

This brief tutorial is going to show you how to install ProFTPD server in CentOS 7. With this package installed, you will be able to access your servers using FTP clients to manage files and folders efficiently.

Now, when it comes to FTP servers for Linux systems, there are primarily two big players in the game. One is VSFPD and the other is ProFTPD. These two FTP servers are great, and our next blog on FTP will feature VSFTPD.

ProFTPD is a GPL-licensed FTP server that can be installed for free on your Linux system. It’a highly configurable and very stable with huge support from the Linux community.

When you’re ready, logon to your CentOS 7 machine and follow the steps below to install the software.

 

  • Installing ProFTPD Server in CentOS 7

To install ProFTPD in CentOS 7, run the commands below to enable EPEL 7 repository. This repository contains many great and valuable packages that are not installed in CentOS by default.

Because some packages are not readily available in CentOS, you must enable some repositories which contain these packages in order to install them. EPEL is one of these repositories.

Run the commands below to enable EPEL 7 in CentOS 7

rpm -Uvh http://ftp.astral.ro/mirrors/fedora/pub/epel/7/x86_64/e/epel-release-7-2.noarch.rpm

 

Next, run the commands below to install ProFTPD server

yum install proftpd proftpd-utils

 

  • Enabling FTP Access Remotely

After installing the package, make sure to enable access to it through the firewall. By default, FTP access is blocked by the firewall. To enable access through the firewall, run the commands below.

firewall-cmd --permanent --zone=public --add-service=ftp

 

Next, reload the firewall configuration by running the commands below.

firewall-cmd --reload

 

After configuring the firewall, run the commands below to start ProFTPD

systemctl start proftpd.service

 

To enable ProFTPD to automatically start up every time your server starts or reboots, run the commands below.

systemctl enable proftpd.service

 

That’s it!

Now all you have to do is open an FTP client and connect to the server using its IP address, hostname or domain name. If  everything is configure correctly, you should be granted access to the sever with the correct username and password.

One thing to remember is that the root user is not allowed to sign in using FTP by default. You must enable root login or create a separate account to sign in using FTP.

All other users will be able to logon to the FTP server.  ProFTPD default configuration file is at /etc/proftpd.conf.

Edit that file to enable other features.

Enjoy!