set verbose logging for ProFTPd

Question

Proftpd 1.3.5e Server on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

How do I set up verbose logging for ProFTPd such that the ftp USER and filename and IP address and timestamp all show up on one line? For each file name uploaded and/or downloaded? One line per file?

Thanks!

Answer 1

There are two ways you might achieve this. The easiest is to configure a TransferLog directive in your proftpd.conf:

TransferLog /var/log/proftpd/xfer.log

The format of this log file is fixed; see xferlog(5) for details. But the format does include the fields you requested.

Alternatively, you can use ProFTPD's more sophisticated LogFormat directive to specify your own log format, and then the ExtendedLog directive to use that LogFormat for writing to a specific file, e.g.

LogFormat custom "%{iso8601} %u %f %a"
ExtendedLog /var/log/proftpd/custom.log READ,WRITE custom

Hope this helps!