What is scponly?

Scponly is a limited shell for allowing users to  scp/sftp to a linux box. Addtionally, we can setup scponly to chroot the user into a particular directory increasing the level of security. 

How to install and set up a new chrooted sftp account using scponly?

• Download scponly pacakge from sourceforge:

• Untar and cd to it.

• Do a configure making use of chrooted binary so that user is chrooted to home directory

Then run a "make" and "make install" for completing the install of binary "/usr/local/sbin/scponlyc"

• Add the entry to /usr/local/sbin/scponlyc to /etc/shells.

• Let's create a new user jake (Ensure that user "jake" do not exist) using following command:

It will promtpt for username and password. Enter username as "jake" and password of your choice.
It creates user, sets shell to /usr/local/sbin/scponlyc and copies relevant system files to
/home/jake/ to ensure user is chrooted.

• Also create a folder "dev"  under /home/jake and and copy /dev/null as that is required for sftp to work.

• Jake's upload directory is /home/jake/incoming.

In case, jake do not intend to upload to /home/jake/incoming, but instead to another location, say /usr/local/website/www_jake_com, then we can do mount mind
as shown below:
Test it out to confirm if chrooted sftp works for jake as expected.