Ubuntu – AWStats: cannot access /var/log/apache2/access.log

I'd recommend setting it to be owned by james:james.

Alternatively, you could leave it as root:root and requite sudo for anybody deploying files in there, but if you are directly working in the /var/www directory (rather than working somewhere else and pushing the files there) that may not be convenient, and it won't work with FTP either.

You can set the owner of /var/www to whatever you like, as long as the www-data user has read access. You can achieve this by setting permissions to allow world read access (as is default).

By default, it is owned by root:root (not www-data as you state in the question).

• For security, it is not a good idea to set it to be owned by www-data. www-data is intended to be an unprivileged account which cannot write to any files, and can only read them.

  Yes, occasionally you may need to give www-data the permission to write to a given file, but for security this should be strictly limited to those particular files, and precautions should be taken such as making sure no such files are executable as scripts by the web server (ie they are not in a location where they may be interpreted as PHP or CGI files), etc.

• For security, it is an even worse idea to set the file permissions to world-writable (eg, 777). Unprivileged users such as www-data should not be able to write to files in this directory. The only people who need write access will be the people who are actually writing files in there.

• The /var/www directory is intended to be yours to do with what you like. It makes sense to set ownership to whichever account will be editing the files. You can create a group for this purpose if you have multiple people, but in this case it's just you.

  Note: if creating a group, create a new group. Do not re-use the www-data group as that is intended to be an unprivileged group without write access to any files (as I explain above).

Too often I see people recommending adopting very bad security practices such as setting /var/www to be owned by www-data, or adding people to the www-data group in order to give that group editing privileges, or setting /var/www to be world-writable (eg 777). By doing any of this you are potentially opening yourself up to significant security problems.

Usually, it is a bad idea to give write access to the account running the Web Server (www-data under Ubuntu).

For your scenario, I would change the owner of /var/www/html to the ftpuser with a read-write for him, read only for the group and the others. Apache needs at least to be able to read in this directory.

UPD: If you have more than one user to give access to, put them all in the same group, change the group ownership to this group and give the group read & write access too.

Security-wise, it is a bad idea to give Apache write access to all files he can access. If someone is able to do "nasty things" with your web server, at least he won't be able to change the files using Apache directly.

Don't forget to secure the installation of the FTP server you intend to use to let ftpuser upload files.

If Mediawiki needs to write on some files, I would give to these files only the read-write rights for the www-data user (by setting the owner of these files to www-data). If you cannot predict which files need to be writable by the web application, you'd better to isolate this application into a subfolder of ´/var/www/html´.

By experience, I know that when right access is needed on some of the file, usually the documentation of the application details exactly which ones.