How To Install and Configure vsftpd on Fedora 23

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

Pre-Flight Check

• These instructions are intended specifically for installing the VSFTP server on Fedora 23. If you’re on a different operating system, check out our guides for installing vsftpd on Fedora 22, CentOS 7, and Ubuntu 15.04.
• We’ll be logging into a Liquid Web Self Managed Fedora 23 server as root.

Step #1: Install vsftpd

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

dnf -y update

Now we’ll install vsftpd and any required packages:

dnf -y install vsftpd

Step #2: Configure vsftpd

First, we’ll edit the configuration file for vsftpd:

vim /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf

Now, to prevent anonymous FTP access, we’ll change the anonymous_enable setting to “NO”:

anonymous_enable=NO

We do want to allow local users to log in, so we’ll change the local_enable setting to “YES”:

local_enable=YES

If you want local users to be able to write to a directory, you’ll also need to change the write_enable setting to “YES”:

write_enable=YES

For our purposes, we want local users to be ‘jailed’ with no access to any other part of the server. To accomplish that, we simply uncomment the chroot_local_user setting by removing the preceding “#”, so that:

#chroot_local_user=YES

becomes

chroot_local_user=YES

Now save and exit the file with the command:

:wq

At this point, we’ll restart the vsftpd service with the new configuration:

systemctl restart vsftpd

Finally, we’ll set the vsftpd service to start at boot:

systemctl enable vsftpd

That should produce output similar to the following:

[root@host ~]# systemctl enable vsftpd
Created symlink from /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/vsftpd.service to /usr/lib/systemd/system/vsftpd.service

Step #3: Allow vsftpd Through the Firewall

Allow the default FTP port, port 21, through firewalld:

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

And reload the firewall:

firewall-cmd --reload

Possible Errors

There are a few common vsftpd errors that we’ve already solved for you! Check out the following if you run into issues:
Error: 500 OOPS: vsftpd: refusing to run with writable root inside chroot() [SOLVED]
Error: 500 OOPS: priv_sock_get_cmd [SOLVED]
Error: 500 OOPS: priv_sock_get_int [SOLVED]