properly not using root login for permissions with ftp

Question

First off, I have a strong belief that I am trying to solve this issue with the entirely wrong point of view, so please, feel free to yell at me about how entirely wrong I am.

My problem is that my configuration files for Apache are in /etc/apache2. Everything in here has -rw-r--r-- and is owned by root. This is making it so I can't easily edit the files from Notepad++'s FTP client. I am aware that I can sudo vim anything from within SSH, but working with Notepad++ is something I'd much rather do.

My first thought was to simply enable root logins through FTP, but i thought that might be a security issue. and upon googling around, I found many.... MANY people telling me exactly that.

Answer 1

All you have do do is properly configure your ftp service provider. I use VSFTPD, so my configuration was in /etc/vsftpd.conf

inside there, there was a setting commented out, #chown-uploads=YES. after uncommenting this (by removing the pound symbol) all files uploaded via ftp were owned by the currently logged in user. this allowed easy editting from notepad++.