How to Create/ Modify an Account to Give FTP Access Only

This is a very practical problem many web administrators face these days. Suppose you have an user who needs to have the FTP access only and not the SSH or any kind shell access per se. How do you do that? To create/ modify an account that will have only FTP access, you need to follow these simple steps below.

You need be logged in as root (Linux) or Administrator (Windows).

1. Supposing you have vsftpd (Very Secure FTP Daemon) as your FTP server, if you don’t, get it installed with
   

   yum install vsftpd

2. Now open its configuration file and modify it to secure your FTP access by disabling anonymous log-in (this is a recommended but optional step. You can skip it)
   

   vi /etc/vsftpd/vsftpd.conf
   anonymous_enable=NO

3. We know that nologin is the program that is applied on the system accounts which are not intended for anyone to interactively log in to the shell system. So we will use this command in the terminal:
   • For New users:
     

     useradd -s /sbin/nologin <username>

   • For Existing Users:
     

     usermod -s /sbin/nologin <username>

And that is it. You have successfully crated/ changed account permission of someone to FTP access only.