Linux – How to remove root-only access for /var/www files

linuxpermissions

I have set up a LAMP environment. All of the files that I want to run on the localhost are placed into my /var/www directory. Each time I want to open up a file with write permissions, I have to prefix the command with sudo at the beginning. How do I change the permissions of /var/www so any user other than root can modify the contents?

Best Answer

The simplest way is to change the ownership to your userid. This should not be user id the webserver is accessing the files you are using. Use the chown command recursively. Try a command like:

sudo chown -R $LOGNAME /var/www

This will recursively change the /var/www directory tree to your userid. LOGNAME is normally set to your userid. This can be verified with the command echo $LOGNAME.

Limit write access by the web server to as few directories and files as possible.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu 9.04 /var/www permissions

You add write privilegues with +w, not +r.

sudo chmod -R g+w /var/www

And luca has to relogin to have the group assignment changes take effect.

Linux – How to correctly set writable the /var/www/ directory of an Ubuntu Linux system

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.

Best Answer

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Ubuntu 9.04 /var/www permissions

Linux – How to correctly set writable the /var/www/ directory of an Ubuntu Linux system

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