Ubuntu 18.04 LAMP Server – Quick Setup and FTP to Webserver

I recently setup an Ubuntu 18.04 webserver to test webpages locally. I used tasksel to quickly install the LAMP server role as follows:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install tasksel
sudo tasksel install lamp-server

With the webserver up and running I needed to be able to FTP into the var/www/html directories to upload my HTML and CSS.

As Ubuntu server comes with SSH installed be default I decided to use that for FTP instead of installing something like vsftd (Very Secure FTP Daemon). FTP over SSH turned out to be a much simpler and quicker setup.

Warning: These steps do not restrict access to folders outside of the /var/www/html directories. As such this setup is not recommended for any kind of production server.

First create a new directory under /var/www/html:

cd /var/www/html
sudo mk dir newdirectory

Create a new user and give the user a password:

sudo adduser ftpuser
sudo passwd ftpuser

Finally give the new user the permissions that they need. Change the directory ownership and group:

sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/html/newdirectory

Give the group write permissions to the directory:

sudo chmod -R 775 /var/www/html/newdirectory

Add the new user to the www-data group:

sudo usermod -a -G www-data ftpuser

With this done I configured FileZilla to establish a secure FTP connection to my webserver.

Filezilla: Secure FTP using SSH File Transfer Protocol.

Sources:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/permissions-on-var-www-html-for-uploading-web-site-files-via-sftp