Ubuntu – the default permission of folder /var

What I recommend doing has been mostly described in this Ask Ubuntu question.

For this particular case I would install suPHP which in short allows you to execute PHP scripts as your user under Apache.

By doing the following:

sudo chown -R youruser:youruser /var/www
find /var/www/ -type d -exec chmod 0755 {} \;
find /var/www/ -type f -exec chmod 0644 {} \;

Install suphp-common and libapache2-mod-suphp from this ppa (What are PPAs and how do I use them?)

Disable mod_php5 and enable mod_suphp

sudo a2enmod suphp
sudo a2dismod php5

Update your virtual hosts to include this line at the bottom of them:

suPHP_UserGroup youruser youruser

Replacing youruser with the user you use to edit files on the server. Restart Apache.

From this point forward Apache will execute all php scripts are your user, which means they can be owned by your user/group and there is no need to use crazy permissions like 777. Since everything is run as your user all files created by the php scripts will be owned by your user as well! There are many other cool things you can do with suPHP; however, from what it sounds like this is all you'll need to get started.

The installation of Apache may appears to be running as root but in actuality it's running as the user apache. You can check this by looking in this file:

$ grep "^User" /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf
User apache

Your entire wordpress directory should likely be owned by this user if you're planning on managing the installation using wordpress through the web UI.

I usually create a separate directory for wordpress like this:

$ pwd
/var/www
$ ls -l | grep wordpress
drwxr-xr-x. 5 apache apache    4096 Apr 25 19:27 wordpress

Here's the contents of the wordpress directory just so you can see it:

-rw-r--r--. 1 apache apache      395 Jan  8  2012 index.php
-rw-r--r--. 1 apache apache  5009441 Jan 23 13:40 latest.tar.gz
-rw-r--r--. 1 apache apache    19929 May  6  2012 license.txt
-rw-r--r--. 1 apache apache     9177 Jan 25 11:25 readme.html
-rw-r--r--. 1 apache apache     4663 Nov 17  2012 wp-activate.php
drwxr-xr-x. 9 apache apache     4096 Dec 11  2012 wp-admin
-rw-r--r--. 1 apache apache      271 Jan  8  2012 wp-blog-header.php
-rw-r--r--. 1 apache apache     3522 Apr 10  2012 wp-comments-post.php
-rw-rw-rw-. 1 apache apache     3466 Jan 23 17:15 wp-config.php
-rw-r--r--. 1 apache apache     3177 Nov  1  2010 wp-config-sample.php
drwxr-xr-x. 7 apache apache     4096 Apr 24 20:15 wp-content
-rw-r--r--. 1 apache apache     2718 Sep 23  2012 wp-cron.php
drwxr-xr-x. 9 apache apache     4096 Dec 11  2012 wp-includes
-rw-r--r--. 1 apache apache     1997 Oct 23  2010 wp-links-opml.php
-rw-r--r--. 1 apache apache     2408 Oct 26  2012 wp-load.php
-rw-r--r--. 1 apache apache    29310 Nov 30  2012 wp-login.php
-rw-r--r--. 1 apache apache     7723 Sep 25  2012 wp-mail.php
-rw-r--r--. 1 apache apache     9899 Nov 22  2012 wp-settings.php
-rw-r--r--. 1 apache apache    18219 Sep 11  2012 wp-signup.php
-rw-r--r--. 1 apache apache     3700 Jan  8  2012 wp-trackback.php
-rw-r--r--. 1 apache apache     2719 Sep 11  2012 xmlrpc.php

I usually also manage any Apache configs related to wordpress in it's own wordpress.conf file under this directory,/etc/httpd/conf.d/`.

# wordpress.conf
Alias / "/var/www/wordpress/"
<Directory "/var/www/wordpress/">
Order Deny,Allow
Deny from all
#Allow from 127.0.0.1 192.168.1
Allow from all
AllowOverride all
</Directory>
#RewriteLog "/var/www/wordpress/rewrite.log"
#RewriteLogLevel 3