Unlike many daemons, Pure-FTPd doesn't read any configuration file (but for
LDAP and SQL). Instead, it uses command-line options. For instance, the '-H'
flag is designed to speed up highly loaded servers, by avoiding DNS lookups.
To enable this, just add it to the server name:

/usr/local/sbin/pure-ftpd -H

Alternative long options are also supported. Here's an equivalent of the
previous command:

/usr/local/sbin/pure-ftpd --dontresolve

But you can use traditional configuration files over command-line
options. Adding a parser for configuration files in the server is a bad
idea. It slows down everything and needs resources for nothing.

If you want to use a configuration file with Pure-FTPd, you can, through
a wrapper. That wrapper will parse a file and convert it to command-line
options. Then, the server will be started with these options.

Please have a look at the 'configuration-files' directory. Copy the sample
configuration file called 'pure-ftpd.conf' to a suitable location, say /etc:

cd configuration-files
cp pure-ftpd.conf /etc

Edit /etc/pure-ftpd.conf according to your needs.

Then, to start the server, just run the following command:

chmod 755 pure-config.pl
./pure-config.pl /etc/pure-ftpd.conf

This is a simple Perl script that will run /usr/local/sbin/pure-ftpd with
the right options, according to the configuration file.

And because there's a Python vs. Perl friendly war since ages, we also
provide a Python version of this program ('pure-config.py').

Should any of these config tools contain a wrong path or fail otherwise,
please file a bug report.