How to enable verbose logging in pure-ftpd on Debian and Ubuntu

To turn on verbose logging (e.g. to debug FTP connection or authentication problems) in pure-ftpd FTP server on Debian and Ubuntu Linux.

Enable debug log in pure-ftpd

Execute the following command as root user in the shell to enable verbose logging:

echo 'yes' > /etc/pure-ftpd/conf/VerboseLog

and then restart pure-ftpd, for init based systems:

service pure-ftpd-mysql restart

For Servers that use systemd:

systemctl restart pure-ftpd-mysql

Enable verbose log pure-ftpd

The debug output will be logged to syslog. To view the log content, execute:

tail -n 100 /var/log/syslog | grep ftp

Debug pure-ftpd issues

And as we can see in the screenshot, debug mode helped us to identify an issue with a missing dhparams file.

Turn off verbose log in pure-ftpd

To disable verbose logging, execute these commands:

rm -f /etc/pure-ftpd/conf/VerboseLog
service pure-ftpd-mysql restart

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