Dreamweaver not recognizing symbolic link as directory

Question

I have this directory

drwxrwxr-x  6 awdfiles                pasgroup                4096 Jan 31 17:20 awdfiles

Which I want to access via another FTP connection. The user is part of the pasgroup

I traverse to the root html directory of my desired user and create the symlink

$ cd rayhawkpas/dev
$ ln -s ../../awdfiles awdfiles
lrwxrwxrwx  1 rayhawkpas rayhawkpas   14 Feb  6 13:06 awdfiles -> ../../awdfiles

However, when I try to download the directory in dreamweaver it looks like this

It seems to not recognize that it's a directory.

I tried symlinking to a specific file to make sure my permissions were right

ln -s ../../awdfiles/themes/1/includes/header.php test.php

This worked fine. It showed up in dreamweaver and I was able to download and upload the file.

Answer 1

Your FTP Server is not configured to follow symlinks.
When configured this way a symlink will appear as a common file, just as you describe.
Change it's configuration. You haven't mentioned what software so I can't say how.

Edit:
vsFTPd will not allow synlinks that link outside the user's chroot. There's no way around that.

A possible workaround is to mount the target of the proposed symlink as a subdirectory of the chroot environment. This is an ugly kludge, but the only way around the issue using vsFTPD.

A possible alternatives, install and use a different FTPd, or use a different protocol such as SFTP. I'm not sure if Dreamweaver supports SFTP, if it doesn't you can get around that with a utility that mounts SFTP drives as Windows Network Drives (I use such a utility, ExpandDrive, but there are others).