How to setup a SFTP server with chrooted users

I’ll explain in this article how to properly setup a SFTP server with chrooted users being only able to access their own directory, and authenticated by public keys or a password. This is a very useful setup, which can get a bit tricky especially with the permissions. Unlike FTPS which is FTP over TLS, SFTP is a totally different protocol built on top of SSH. This especially means you don’t need any third-party software, since OpenSSH is installed by default on most linux distributions.

Quickly access your configuration files on your server

It’s been a while since I last wrote a post on this blog, so I’ve decided to share a simple way to quickly access the configuration files of the numerous services you may be running on your server. It is indeed quite painful to frequently edit arbitrary deep configuration files (such as /etc/php5/apache2/php.ini) that are spread out in your file system and which you don’t remember the names. The trick I am using is a directory named cfg at the root of my server, in which I create symbolic links pointing to configuration files or directories containing them, with names that are easier to remember.