[thelist] Creating FTP Users with PHP

[Simon Willison]

Jake Aust wrote:

>Is it possible to create a new user in a Linux system suing PHP. I want to
>allow an admin page to create a new user that would create a home directory
>for the user and create a username/password that would authenticate in the
>FTP server.
>
>How would you go about this. I am on Linux/Apache1.3/ProFTPD, running a
>bunch of Virtual Hosts. I would only want the user to be allowed to log in
>to their own virtual host.
>
Work out how you do it on the command line, then use exec() (or a
simnilar function) in PHP to run that command. You may have to mess
around with permissions stuff though (I don't have experience with that,
I think there's a flag you can set on a program to give it higher
permissions than it would have normally or something). As always when
executing commands via PHP be very, very careful to check the command
extensively before running it.