Server – How to Give Directory Ownership to Apache User

If you run chown without a preceding colon, you will change the owner. (With the preceding colon, you change the group, as you have demonstrated above, and you can also run chown -R new-owner:newgroup.) So if you just run

sudo chown -R www-data /var/www/pootle

you will change the owner to www-data.

"....when apache creates a file, its group is www-data..."

Can you clarify what you mean by this? Apache serves files, it doesn't create them. PHP creates them - but they are created dynamically and served directly to web clients (browsers), they are not created and then saved by Apache.

It seems your problem is with file ownership. If so, a more convenient approach might be to add pootle to the www group - as Apache (generally) needs htm(l) files to be owned by www to read them. Files then created by Pootle will have the same group ID and you won't need to run chown at all - Apache will have read access to Pootle's files. See http://translate.sourceforge.net/wiki/pootle/apache which says:

 You need to extract Pootle in a directory accessible to the apache user.

Make sure Apache has read access to all of Pootle's files and write access to the dbs and po subdirectories.

Hope this helps.

You can use this script to fix wordpress permission:

#!/bin/bash
#
# This script configures WordPress file permissions based on recommendations
# from http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress#File_permissions
#
# Author: Michael Conigliaro <mike [at] conigliaro [dot] org>
#
WP_OWNER=www-data # <-- wordpress owner
WP_GROUP=www-data # <-- wordpress group
WP_ROOT=$1 # <-- wordpress root directory
WS_GROUP=www-data # <-- webserver group

# reset to safe defaults
find ${WP_ROOT} -exec chown ${WP_OWNER}:${WP_GROUP} {} \;
find ${WP_ROOT} -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find ${WP_ROOT} -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;

# allow wordpress to manage wp-config.php (but prevent world access)
chgrp ${WS_GROUP} ${WP_ROOT}/wp-config.php
chmod 660 ${WP_ROOT}/wp-config.php

# allow wordpress to manage wp-content
find ${WP_ROOT}/wp-content -exec chgrp ${WS_GROUP} {} \;
find ${WP_ROOT}/wp-content -type d -exec chmod 775 {} \;
find ${WP_ROOT}/wp-content -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;

save it to a file and run it and pass it your wp installation directory:

wget https://gist.github.com/Adirael/3383404/raw/6c5446d56477426faeb709e5b807f00422acdea2/fix-wordpress-permissions.sh
chmod +x fix-wordpress-permissions.sh
sudo ./fix-wordpress-permissions.sh /var/www/html

https://gist.github.com/Adirael/3383404