If you’re using ProFTPD user on a Linux server you most certainly has wondered how you can configure the FTP server to chroot (or jail) it’s users to a particular directory of choice.
By the default the behaviour of ProFPTD is not to use any chrooting, I believe because chrooting is not yet a mass well accepted standard, so you will have to do a minor modifications to proftpd.conf file.
Actually it’s a way easier than it sounds to configure the ProFTPD to chroot / jail it’s users.
To configure ProFTPD to chroot it’s users to the /home directory all you have to do is edit your proftpd.conf
On Debian Linux and many other Linux distributions the proftpd.conf is located in /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf
root@linux-server:~# vim /etc/proftpd/proftpd.conf
Therein uncomment the line
# DefaultRoot ~
to read
DefaultRoot ~
If you further need to chroot proftpd users to be jailed to let’s say their public_html file for security reasons you can just change the up-mentioned proftpd DocumentRoot directive to:
DefaultRoot ~/public_html
Hopefully partaking this steps will be a step further to make your Linux server a bit more secure.
