By Martin Bean
I’ve created a droplet, but the owner and group is root.
In other set-ups, I’ve seen the web root have user and group of something like www-data or apache.
How do I emulate this set-up so I can read and write files to my web root without needing to run commands as sudo?
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The webserver runs as www-data on Debian-based systems, and apache or nginx on RHEL-based systems. You can change /var/www’s ownership to your webserver’s user so that it can write to it:
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www
Make sure you replace www-data with the actual user that your webserver is running as. Run the following command to find out what that user is:
sudo ps wwaux | grep "http|apache|nginx|fpm" | grep -v grep
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