Ubuntu – Permissions for apache webroot folder on dev server

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.

Do a chmod +x on your user dir, and restart apache. 755 permissions should work. I've had problems with 644.