☑️HTTP/HTTPS

In most organizations HTTP/HTTPS traffic is most commonly allowed through firewall thus it is preferred to transfer files over HTTP/HTTPS. We saw how to setup uploadserver but now lets see how to setup and use other secure web servers like Nginx and Apache. Here are the steps of configuring the web server:

Make a directory to handle uploaded files:

sudo mkdir -p /var/www/uploads/SecretUploadDirectory

change the owner to www-data

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/uploads/SecretUploadDirectory

Create the Nginx configuration file by creating the file /etc/nginx/sites-available/upload.conf with the contents:

server {
    listen 9001;
    
    location /SecretUploadDirectory/ {
        root    /var/www/uploads;
        dav_methods PUT;
    }
}

Symlink our Site to the sites-enabled Directory:

sudo ln -s /etc/nginx/sites-available/upload.conf /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/

Start Nginx:

sudo systemctl restart nginx.service

Now to verify errors:

tail -2 /var/log/nginx/error.log

By default Nginx will use port 80 but sometimes this port might already be in use. To check we can do:

ss -lnpt | grep 80

ps -ef | grep 2811

We have to remove the default Nginx config:

sudo rm /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/default

Now we can test our uploading using cURL and wget:

curl -T /etc/passwd http://localhost:9001/SecretUploadDirectory/users.txt
sudo tail -1 /var/www/uploads/SecretUploadDirectory/users.txt