Hi Guys,

I have a CentOS install with a single website installed and working properly under /var/www/domainname/public_html

installed there is a copy of Invision Power Board, which has a new auto-update feature that uses a FTP connection to automatically install the updated files, etc.

The problem is the only FTP I have been able to set up is via my user account (lets call it user1), and that uploads by default to: /home/user1/ftp

Not only that, but after uploading those files I need to chown them to apache and chmod them as required by the forums, then set chcon for the selinux security etc before those files will be usable by apache.

So my question is, is there a way to set FTP up in such a way as to do all of that automatically for a specific user account to handle forum upgrades? If so, can someone kick me in the right direction please?

Cheers

FTP needs to be eliminated at this point in time. It's not the 1990s any more and there have been safer alternatives for decades.

So I'd say to use chrooted SFTP for the transfers with the starting directory %d pointing to where the files should go.

About setting the permissions on the uploaded files, instead of chown and chmod, you could use the SetGID bit for those directories or an ACL to apply the right group ownership.

Or you could instead run inotify and have an incron job watch the directory for new files and run a shell script to carry out the modifications you need. That works with small numbers of files coming in slowly.

1 members found this post helpful.

Aside from the spot-on advice Turbocapitalist gave you, I'll offer up one more bit of direction: do it like you're doing it now. Circumventing security, uploading directly to the webservers root, etc., are *NOT* good things. Transfer the file(s) to a temp directory under user1 home, and move them to production from there. Also, consider using something like SVN or Git so you can version these files, and roll back if necessary.