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Okay, so I've tried my best at finding the answer to this by searching and looking through possible duplicates, but I just can't so forgive me if it's out there somewhere anyways.

My issue is as follows. I've set the owner of /var/www to myuser:www-data and permissions of the folder and all (currently just the basic index.html) it's content to 750, and Apache seems to run it as supposed, but I can't access it when I FTP into the server as the myuser user. I mean, I can access it, but as soon as I try to edit, delete or add something I just get 500 Permission denied, and if I try to edit the permissions I get 500 Unknown SITE command.

Help! What do I do wrong? The idea on setting the user and group, and then the permissions as above was from a good friend of mine who is sort of an expert, but I feel like I'm bothering him when I ask so many questions, so if you can help me some more, that would be great!

I'm trying to put a backup with 4 vhosts back into the www-folder, but what I put there shouldn't be of any concern, right? That's just the confing of the vhosting later that has got anything to do with that, right?

Thanks in advance!

Added info:

I ran this: myuser@myserver:/$ groups myuser And got this: myuser : myuser adm cdrom sudo dip plugdev lpadmin sambashare Then I ran this: myuser@myserver:/$ groups www-data And got this: www-data : www-data

And then this: myuser@myserver:/var/www$ ls -l And got this: total 4 -rwxr-x--- 1 tjita1 www-data 177 Jan 25 17:45 index.html

Regarding the ftpserver, I didn't do anything in particular, I just installed vsftpd. Oh yeah, I also added a line in I think /etc/vsftpd.conf or something like that, that reads something like this: chmod_enable=YES.

Also, I can't get those 4-space-indents to work, sorry about that..

Seth
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Tjita1
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  • I don't know whether this is right, but messing with permissions of such a directory is not a good way. Anyhow, May I ask the output of `groups myuser` (as in; replace it with the username of the user) please? and also `ls -l` of `www` dir – AzkerM Jan 26 '14 at 12:03
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    How did you setup your ftp server? – falconer Jan 26 '14 at 12:12

4 Answers4

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After you install the ftp server with sudo apt-get install vsftpd you will have to configure it. To enable write access you have to edit the /etc/vsftpd.conf file and uncomment the 

#write_enable=YES

line, so it should read

write_enable=YES

Save the file and restart vsftpd with sudo service vsftpd restart.

For other configuration options consult this documentation or man vsftpd.conf

falconer
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    You are the man. This finally helped me! – Allen Gingrich Aug 30 '14 at 16:46
  • And all the answers on the internet were wrong. Yet, so simple and plain. I even read teh vsftpd.conf just for fun! – M J Jul 08 '17 at 03:17
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    Notice: after this make sure to kill current `vsftpd` process. Then restart it via `sudo service vsftpd start` to make it pick-up these new changes. Now, you will be able to connect via FTP and write/delete files. – Kari Mar 31 '20 at 02:28
5

A simple way I found to use ftp with curl command here. If you wanna use ftp with a single command than use the following command

sudo curl -T file_to_be_uploaded.txt ftp://mydomain.com/mydirectory/ --user username:password

If you get an error 551: permission denied than run it the file you are uploading might be present on the remote and you don't have permission to overwrite it. So upload it with a different file name or delete the current file on the remote.

Ajeet Khan
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1

Run below command - which folder you require files to upload

sudo chown -R <>:root <> example

sudo chown -R myloginid:root /home/myproject

Ramkumar Thangavel
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1

I had the same problem & none of the suggestions about Write_enable or folder permissions worked. I changed my connection type in my FTP client from FTP to SSH/SFTP, and everything worked fine. Apparently, VSFTPD requires a secure connection to write.

J.T. Johnston
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    If you used SFTP, then you're likely *not* using vsftpd, despite the name. FTPS is secure FTP, SFTP is the SSH File Transfer Protocol, and is usually handled by whichever SSH server is installed. – muru May 21 '15 at 05:13