FTP Server on Amazon EC2

This project contains the code for setting up an FTP server at Amazon AWS as an EC2 instance.

Technology

The goal was to get vsftp running in the cloud. Modern system administrators don't set up things like that by hand, they use DevOps. The cloud server should be the product of code, not a human's manual labor. To accomplish that, I used Vagrant with the vagrant-aws plugin to create an Ubuntu 12.04 cloud instance at Amazon EC2. I used the vagrant-omnibus plugin to install Chef, and then I used Chef to provision the instance with vsftp, to configure it, and to create the FTP user(s). The whole thing is fully automated from the vagrant up command.

I used the new bursting T2.micro instance type that only costs $9.50 per month. Plenty of power for an FTP site that only handles a few transfers per day.

Authentication

To spin up an EC2 machine you'll need a key and secret for accessing your AWS account. Create an IAM user in a group with full access to EC2, and provide the key and secret by setting two environment variables:

export AWS_KEY=“[YOUR KEY]"
export AWS_SECRET="[YOUR SECRET]”

To access the EC2 machine you'll need an EC2 key pair. If you have a key pair in a file called ec2-ftp.pem in the root of this project, then you can configure that by setting two environment variables, like this:

export AWS_KEYPAIR_NAME="ec2-ftp”
export AWS_KEYPAIR_PATH="ec2-ftp.pem"

Users

You also need to provide a users.yml file in the root of this project that contains a list of users to set up on the server. You can change this file and then re-provision with Chef, using vagrant provision to make changes to the user list.

The format of the file is:

username:
  password: 'password'
  shadow_hash: 'shadow_hash'

For example, if there are two users, foo and bar, with the passwords password1 and password2 respectively, then the file should look like this:

foo:
  password: 'password1'
  shadow_hash: '$1$yoursalt$u/huh9HuopXpub4Ha3SWO/'
bar:
  password: 'password2'
  shadow_hash: '$1$yoursalt$AWgHV/EkLFgEsWORPVSjh.'

The password: entries are really just there for your benefit. If you're storing them somewhere more secure then they're not necessary.

Generate the shadow hashes with:

openssl passwd -1 -salt "yoursaltphrase"

Use any salt phrase you like.

Ports

You will need to adjust your default security group (or specify a custom group) to open ports for:

FTP (port 21)
SSH/SFTP (port 22)

Setup

Install Git
Install VirtualBox
Install Vagrant
Install the Vagrant-Omnibus plugin for Vagrant: vagrant plugin install vagrant-omnibus
Clone the project to your development system by opening a terminal and switching to the folder on your machine where you want the code (suggestion: cd ~/projects) and enter this command: git clone git@github.com:VenueDriver/ec2-ftp.git. If you can cd ec2-ftp then it worked.
Spin up your Vagrant virtual machine in AWS with vagrant up --provision=aws. Vagrant will automatically use the specified AMI to create a new cloud instance, and then provision (configure) the instance using Chef.

endymion / ec2-ftp