------------------------ VIRTUAL USERS ------------------------ Virtual users is a simple mechanism to store a list of users, with their password, name, uid, directory, etc. It's just like /etc/passwd. But it's not /etc/passwd. It's a different file, only for FTP. It means that you can easily create FTP-only accounts without messing up your system accounts. In addition, virtual users files can store individual quotas, ratios, bandwidth, etc. System accounts can't do this. Thousands of virtual users can share the same system user, as long as they all are chrooted and they have their own home directory. *IMPORTANT* If you are planning to use the virtual users feature, and unless your operating system already provides a secure password hashing function, please install libsodium (http://doc.libsodium.org) before compiling Pure-FTPd. A good thing to do before using virtual users is to create a system user for this. Of course, you can use any existing account like "nobody" (but not root), but it's better to have a dedicated account. Let's create an "ftpgroup" group and an "ftpuser" user. Linux/OpenBSD/NetBSD/Solaris/HPUX/OSX/a lot of other Unix-like systems: groupadd ftpgroup useradd -g ftpgroup -d /dev/null -s /etc ftpuser FreeBSD/DragonflyBSD: pw groupadd ftpgroup pw useradd ftpuser -g ftpgroup -d /dev/null -s /etc Then, all maintenance of virtual users can be made with the "pure-pw" command. You can also edit the files by hand if you want. Files storing virtual users have one line per user. These lines have the following syntax: :::::::::::::::::