Tips to Set Directory Alias on Filezilla Server

Documentation of Filezilla server is not available, the only thing that I can find so far is Filezilla’s forum. I felt really sad the first time I was using Filezilla server on windows, I had to spend lots of time figuring things out. Note just ignore the little tips in Enter Directory Alias dialog, it’s misleading though, I can never have aliases working for me if I follow that reminder 😉

Here is how you can add directory aliases to Filezilla server:

Start Filezilla server interface, click the user/group button on the menu bar, create a user/group if you don’t have one already.

Then select Shared folders from the left panel, and select a user/group from the right panel

Now in the middle panel you can add a few different directories pointing to wherever you want, but if you try to log onto your FTP server now, you will only see the root directory. All other directories are hidden from you since you haven’t added any aliases yet.

Right click one of the directories other than home directory (denoted by a leading H) and choose Edit Aliases from popup menu. In Enter Directory Alias dialog enter the alias for that directory with a leading slash “/”. For example, /pub or /etc. (Don’t try to create nested aliases such as /pub/documents/engineering, I had never got this work for me. If you can please let me know)

Next click OK to close Enter Directory Alias dialog, add more directory aliases as you want.

Once you are done with that, click OK on Users/Groups dialog to make the changes take effect

You should now be able to navigate to different directories from your FTP clients