I am using Ubuntu 16.4 and recently upgraded to php7.4 Things seemed to be ok until I needed to write something to disk for example delete cache or update a configuration file. I am using joomla and can see all the folders are unwriteable. I have a separate user:group for each website when I created each of them.

my structure is var/www/sitename.com/html/rootofsite.

This post [https://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?t=808686] is helpful to a degree but I wanted something more for my droplet.

So something when I upgraded php changed owners somehow. The files and permissions did not change. I suspect the name that apache is running under is changed.

Is there a security implication to setting recursively the www folder to www-data:www-data I think this may allow the apache to access the folders.

Thank You.