Apache – Set Up Apache but Cannot Write to ‘/var/www’ Folder

What I've done is to chroot my users to their home directories and then used mount --bind to create a link to it in their home directories.

I then used setfacl to make sure www-data maintans write permissions on new files in the directory. This effect will recurse into /var/www, which is what you want to do.

By setting g+s on the directory, all new files and directories created within it will inherit the group ownership from its parent.

useradd someuser
mkdir -p /home/someuser/www
mount --bind /var/www /home/someuser/www
chmod g+s /home/someuser/www
chown -R someuser:www-data /home/someuser/www
setfacl -d -m g::rwx /home/someuser/www

That should do the trick.

Make your mounts persistent

Obviously you want your mounts to still be there when you reboot the server. It's as simple as adding the mounts to your /etc/fstab. Not all providers let you touch this file, but most do.

Just add lines like this:

/var/www        /home/someuser/www        none        bind        0        0

You might want to reboot to make sure it works.

Basically the first command:

sudo chmod -R 777 /var/www/

Makes it readable, writable and executable by anyone (any user). You are on the right track with the latter commands, as you can set chown to www-data. www-data is a default user/group for Apache.

Or you could create a new group and add yourself and www-data there, then assign the group to the folder permission with chown.

Also instead of using numeric chmod values, you can use chmod -R ugo+rwx folder which means that give user, group and others => read, write and execute rights to this folder. Similar way you can also remove rights chmod -R ugo-rwx folder.

Setting directory with g+s makes all new files created in said directory have their group set to the directory's group.