Well, first off, I know that it‘s not secure and all that jazz. On the other hand, SFTP on OS X Server has no chroot abilities. So, in order that the few people on my server that need ftp access can have it, I’ve delved into getting it set up and here is my short intro tutorial.

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1. You need to start off in Workgroup Manager. I have set up new users for ftp, so create a user.

2. Under the Advanced tab for the user, set Login Shell to ‘custom…’ and enter ‘/usr/libexec/ftpd’ ; this ensures the user does not have shell access, only ftp access.

1. Under the ‘Home’ tab, click the plus icon and in the ‘Home’ box add the full path to the directory you want the user to have access to, then click OK.

1. Enter a number to limit the Disk Quota, then hit save.

1. Now in a shell, sudo edit the ‘/etc/shells’ file and ensure ‘/usr/libexec/ftpd’ is in the list - you'll only need to do this once.

1. In Server Admin, click on the FTP service and go into Settings tab. Under General, I would disable anonymous access. Under Advanced, set ‘Authenticated users see:’ to ‘Home Directory Only’. Click save and start the service

1. Finally in a shell, ensure that the files contained in the users home directory belong to the user! It‘s also worth noting that if you specify a home directory that doesn’t exist, Server Admin will attempt to create it, and put in the default OS X folders - Desktop, Documents, Movies, Pictures etc. You may want to delete these.

That's it - pretty easy but I found a few gotchas along the way ; hence this tutorial!

SteamSHIFT out.