This is a question that I have seen several discussions about, but am still not sure what the best solution is:
What is the best way to set up users and groups for web folders?
For the sake of this discussion: *I use Ubuntu and Apache *My web-folder is /var/www/mydomain.com *Apache default user is www-data and www-data group *my user is me, adam
Currently, I do this:
add my user to www-data group with:
sudo usermod -aG www-data $USER
and then I just add a symlink for www to my users home folder with:
ln -s /var/www ~/
Now when I sftp into my users home-folder, I can just click through to www and I have enough permissions to edit files and such. If I create new files, I have to remember to run:
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www
Doing that sets the new files to be owned by www-data. Everything works and the internet is happy.
I have been thinking of trying something a little different. What if I set www-data as the default group for adam.
sudo useradd adam -g www-data
And then set adam as the owner of /var/www and www-data as the group
sudo chown -R adam:www-data /var/www
In theory, Apache user www-data will still be able to do its thing, but adam will be the owner, and when I log in as adam I can create new files without having to worry about updating permissions all the time.
Anyone have a better way of handling users? Thoughts on my approach?
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To follow up on this old post, I would like to say that I no longer use the above method that I outlined. I found a post: http://blog.netgusto.com/solving-web-file-permissions-problem-once-and-for-all/
that outlines a much better method, that only takes a few minutes to set up and solves many of the issues I was having.
For nginx, www-data is the user for the nginx worker process. So great, let’s create a group with access, and put www-data in the group.
sudo groupadd webaccess sudo usermod -a -G webaccess www-data sudo chown -R adam:webaccess /var/www/mycontent sudo chmod -R 750 /var/www/mycontent #intent: only adam and nginx can access
In theory, adam should have access since he is the owner. nginx should have access since www-data is in a group with r-x access. But no! I have to set permissions for other to r-x: sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/mycontent for web pages in /var/www/mycontent to be served by nginx.
I don’t get it!
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