How To Install and Configure proftpd on Fedora 23

Posted on January 27, 2016 by dpepper | Updated: April 19, 2023

Category: Tutorials | Tags: Fedora 23, Proftpd

Reading Time: 2 minutes

FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is the most common method of uploading files to a server. A number of FTP servers, such as ProFTPD, and FTP clients exist for every platform.

Pre-Flight Check

These instructions are intended specifically for installing the ProFTP server on Fedora 23. If you’re on a different operating system, check out our guides for installing proftpd on Fedora 21, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, and CentOS 7.
For this tutorial, we’ll be logging in as root to a Liquid Web Self Managed Fedora 23 server.

Step #1: Install ProFTPD

Warning: FTP is an insecure protocol. Data is not encrypted, and all transmissions (including usernames, passwords, commands, and the data itself) are in clear text. Consider securing your FTP connection with SSL/TLS.

As a matter of best practice, we’ll first update our packages:

dnf -y update

Then we’ll install ProFTPD and any required packages:

dnf -y install proftpd

Step #2: Configure ProFTPD

Now we’ll edit the configuration file for ProFTPD:vim /etc/proftpd.conf
In vim, you can press “a” to enter text insertion mode, and hit the escape key (Esc) on your keyboard to return to command mode. For a refresher on editing files with vim, see New User Tutorial: Overview of the Vim Text Editor. If vim is not installed on your OS, you can follow our tutorial on installing vim at How to Install VIM (Visual editor IMproved) on Fedora 23.
In proftpd.conf, you will want to change the ServerName to the hostname of your server:ServerName "ftp.example.com"
Now save and exit the file with the command::wq
To start the ProFTPD service, run:systemctl start proftpd
And to configure ProFTPD’s service to start at boot, run:systemctl enable proftpdThat should produce output similar to the following:
[root@host ~]# systemctl enable proftpd Created symlink from /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/proftpd.service to /usr/lib/systemd/system/proftpd.service.
Finally, verify your work by checking the status of ProFTPD:systemctl status proftpd

Step #3: Allow ProFTPD Through the Firewall

1. Allow the default FTP port, port 21, through firewalld:firewall-cmd --permanent --add-port=21/tcp
2. And reload the firewall:firewall-cmd --reload