PureFTPd and PureFTPd Manager on OS X

#Written by: Michael Wood
#Date: 12-16-2011

Note: You will need the Xcode development tools from Apple's site before you can compile PureFTPd, or you will get error messages because you do not have a compatible gcc compiler.

In this tutorial we will be installing Pure-FTPd on a Mac OS X platform. What is PureFTPd?  Glad you asked:
PureFTPd is a free (BSD), secure, production-quality and standard-conformant FTP server. It doesn't provide useless bells and whistles, but focuses on efficiency and ease of use. It provides simple answers to common needs, plus unique useful features for personal users as well as hosting providers.

PureFTPd homepage is here: http://www.pureftpd.org/project/pure-ftpd

PureFTPd Manager is a simple Cocoa frontend to PureFTPd.  Awesome little app to configure virtual hosts (if you wanted to host different FTP servers from the same server).  You can configure virtual users and also chroot them to their home directory.  Create SSL certificates within the PureFTPd Manager frontend, change advanced configuration settings such as: Listening ports, passive port ranges, FXP support, directory aliases, permissions....the list goes on.

PureFTPd Manager homepage is here: http://jeanmatthieu.free.fr/pureftpd/

Let's get started:

We need to download the latest tarball package from PureFTPd's ftp server, so go ahead and open a terminal window.  When the terminal window opens you should be in your home directory.  Change the directory to Downloads:
cd Downloads

The latest tarball package, as of this writing, from PureFTPd's ftp server is pure-ftpd-1.0.35.tar.gz.  We need to download it, run this command:
curl -O ftp://ftp.pureftpd.org/pub/pure-ftpd/releases/pure-ftpd-1.0.35.tar.gz

Extract the archive:
tar -zxvf pure-ftpd-1.0.35.tar.gz

Change to the directory where you extracted the tarball:
cd pure-ftpd-1.0.35

Now we need to compile it.  We will compile it with everything and virtual chroot for all users.  This is the part, that you will run into errors, without the Xcode development tools.
Run this command:
./configure --with-everything --with-virtualchroot

Make the install:
sudo make install-strip

Start PureFTPd:
Note: You can pass additional switches to start PureFTPd, like passive port ranges, no anonymous access, etc. This is all configurable with PureFTPd Manager.
sudo /usr/local/sbin/pure-ftpd &


So, now PureFTPd is installed, lets download PureFTPd Manager.  The latest version of PureFTPd Manager is 1.8.  Open a browser and download the dmg image:
http://jeanmatthieu.free.fr/pureftpd/pkg/PureFTPd-Manager-1.8.dmg
Open Finder and browse to your Downloads directory and install the app like you normally would.  When you launch PureFTPd Manager for the first time you should see at the bottom that it tells you PureFTPd is running.  Go ahead and start playing around with it.  Cool stuff!


That should be it.  Have fun!