Ubuntu – Default file permissions for php user www-data

chmodftppermissionsPHP

I have a php installed on my ubuntu machine. The web root is /var/www

I set the permissions for this folder like so:

sudo chown -R ftpuser:www-data /var/www

ftpuser is the user I set up so I can ftp to /var/www from another machine on the network. www-data is the user php uses. I double checked using whoami from php.

Whenever I ftp upload a new file to the machine the group has no permissions to the file. So when I try to access it in my browser via machine-name/new-file.php I am told permission denied and I have to go and chmod the new file.

I am wondering if there is a way I can default the www-data user/group to have access permissions to new files so I don't have to keep chmod every new file?

Best Answer

You could use ACL. To set up ACL for Ubuntu 10.10, first mount the file systems with the acl option in /etc/fstab.

sudo vim /etc/fstab

UUID=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx / ext4 defaults,acl 0 1

sudo mount -o remount,acl /

Then make a group to which a user may belong for this purpose.

sudo groupadd developers
sudo usermod -a -G developers $username

The user needs to log out and in again to become a member of the developers group.

Of course, do not do this if you have content in the /var/www directory that you want, but just to illustrate setting it up to start:

sudo rm -rf /var/www
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/public
sudo chown -R root.developers /var/www/public
sudo chmod 0775 /var/www/public
sudo chmod g+s /var/www/public
sudo setfacl -d -m u::rwx,g::rwx,o::r-x /var/www/public

Then replace references to "/var/www" with "/var/www/public" in a config file and reload.

sudo vim /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

If we wanted to restrict delete and rename from all but the user who created the file:

sudo chmod +t /var/www/public

This way, if we want to create directories for frameworks that exist outside the Apache document root or maybe create server-writable directories, it's still easy.

Apache-writable logs directory:

sudo mkdir /var/www/logs
sudo chgrp www-data /var/www/logs
sudo chmod 0770 /var/www/logs

Apache-readable library directory:

sudo mkdir /var/www/lib
sudo chgrp www-data /var/www/lib
sudo chmod 0750 /var/www/lib
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