Thanks to everyone for their suggestions. Based on some constraints, your advice, some googling, I arrived at this set-up, but I am not sure how secure it is.
1. The web creation software (iWeb on a Mac) only supports ftp and sftp to upload a site.
2. iWeb does not support the use of "versions" for the web pages. By that I mean iWeb is strictly one way - create a site and publish it. It cannot import an iWeb site, it has to start at the beginning. One can create a site and publish it, then edit the site, and publish again, but it cannot import or use a previous version of the site as a starting point. (I mention this because Eric suggested using git, which sounded like a great idea, but alas
I have this setup, but I could use some advice on how to make it more secure....
1. User account fred
2. fred's home is /var/www/domain/fred
3. /var/www/domain/fred has owner:group fred:fred
4. Document root is /var/www/domain/fred
Thanks,
Mark
On Wed, Dec 28, 2011 at 10:26 AM, Eric Shubert
<ejs@shubes.net> wrote:
On 12/27/2011 10:46 PM, Mark Phillips wrote:
I need to give a user access to my web server via sftp to upload web
site changes. What is the best way to do this? I have several other
sites on the same server, so I want to prevent them or anyone else who
gains access to their account from being able to make changes to those
sites or other parts of the server.
Thanks,
Mark
Then, create their user such that their home directory is their web site's directory, and they cannot log in to the system (only vsftp) with an /etc/passwd entry like this:
vsftpuser:x:511:511::/var/vhosts/domain.com/docs:/sbin/nologin
Files in their web site are owned by their user, with read permissions for 'other' (o+r), which allows apache (or nginx) to read them.
--
-Eric 'shubes'