Install and Configure Samba

1. Overview

A Samba file server enables file sharing across different operating systems over a network. It lets you access your desktop files from a laptop and share files with Windows and macOS users.

This guide covers the installation and configuration of Samba on Ubuntu.

What you’ll learn

• How to set up a Samba file server
• How to share files across a local network

What you’ll need

• Ubuntu 16.04 LTS+
• A Local Area Network (LAN) to share files over

If you have everything ready, let’s dive straight into the installation process on the next step!

2. Installing Samba

To install Samba, we run:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install samba -y

We can check if the installation was successful by running:

whereis samba

The following should be its output:

samba: /usr/sbin/samba /usr/lib/samba /etc/samba /usr/share/samba /usr/share/man/man7/samba.7.gz /usr/share/man/man8/samba.8.gz

3. Setting up Samba

Now that Samba is installed, we need to create a directory for it to share, the folder is arbitrary and this command can be customized for your environment.

mkdir /home/<username>/sambashare/

The command above creates a new folder sambashare in our home directory which we will share later.

The configuration file for Samba is located at /etc/samba/smb.conf. To add the new directory as a share, we edit the file by running:

sudo nano /etc/samba/smb.conf

At the bottom of the file, add the following lines:

[sambashare]
    comment = Samba on Ubuntu
    path = /home/username/sambashare
    read only = no
    browsable = yes

What we’ve just added

• comment: A brief description of the share.
• path: The directory of our share.
• read only: Permission to modify the contents of the share folder is only granted when the value of this directive is no.
• browsable: When set to yes, file managers such as Ubuntu’s default file manager will list this share under “Network” (it could also appear as browseable).

Now that we have our new share configured, save it and restart Samba for it to take effect:

sudo service smbd restart

Update the firewall rules to allow Samba traffic:

sudo ufw allow samba

4. Setting up User Accounts and Connecting to Share

Since Samba doesn’t use the system account password, we need to set up a Samba password for our user account:

sudo smbpasswd -a username