Chapter 6. Setting up FTP Access
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Chapter 6. Setting up FTP Access

Table of Contents

6.1. Setting FTP quotas

Before you start this chapter

  1. Connect to your server over SFTP using FileZilla (see Chapter 3, Connecting to your server with FileZilla and SFTP).
  2. Set up a website (see Chapter 4, Website setup).

Fast forward to the scenario where you have a web hosting client who has designed their own site and would like to upload it themselves. However it is not necessary to grant them access to all domains on the machine, or even the config or mailboxes section of their own domain.

This is typical for a shared hosting client, and the solution is to give them FTP access. This limits them to the files inside the public/ directory, i.e. only those associated with the website.

Warning

Please be aware that despite being limited to the public/ directory when logging in over FTP, it is trivial for the user to read files elsewhere on the filesystem, for example by using specially written PHP scripts. It is advisable to grant access only to trusted people.

In this example, access to the content of the my-brilliant-site.com site is being given to another user, but they are only to have access to /srv/my-brilliant-site.com/public/. To set this up, an FTP password is being created.

  1. Connect to your machine using FileZilla.

  2. Navigate to /srv/my-brilliant-site.com/config/

  3. Create a file ftp-password a that contains a secure password your shared hosting client will use, ensure that the config/ directory is selected b and upload the file, c. Make sure that there is no txt extension on this file.

Now that is all that is needed. Access to the machine can now be granted over FTP using the username my-brilliant-site.com and the password being the contents of /srv/my-brilliant-site.com/config/ftp-password.

We will now test the connection to make sure it works, also using FileZilla, since it can be used to connect via FTP as well as SFTP.

  1. Make sure FileZilla has disconnected from the machine.

  2. The host a and the user b are both the domain name, in this case my-brilliant-site.com. The password c is the contents of the ftp-password file and for FTP the port number must be set to 21, d.

  3. Once you connect you’ll notice that you only have access to directories beneath the public/ directory (here represented as "/") of the my-brilliant-site.com/ directory tree, which is all you’d need if your role was limited to maintaining or setting up a web site.

6.1. Setting FTP quotas

It is possible to limit the amout of data that can be kept in a domain’s public/ directory using an FTP quota. This is done by creating a file inside the domain’s config/ directory called ftp-quota. Inside this file should be a number of bytes at which the quota is set.

The number can have a suffix of k, M, G, or T representing kilo-, mega-, giga-, or terabytes respectively.

For example, to prevent the author of my-brilliant-site.com from putting more than 150MB inside their public/ directory, create a file called /srv/my-brilliant-site.com/config/ftp-quota with the contents 150M. This will limit their space usage to 150,000,000 bytes.

Note

Please be aware that the FTP quota will include all log data from the web-server in public/logs/, as well as the automatically generated statistics in public/htdocs/stats/.

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