No longer have permission to access files using sftp for sudo user

Posted March 7, 2020
Ubuntu 18.04 WordPress LAMP Stack

Hi, I have recently installed wordpress on my lamp running on ubuntu 18.04. I followed this guide https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-install-wordpress-with-lamp-on-ubuntu-18-04

Everything is working in wordpress but now I can’t upload, edit or browse my wordpress folder files using sftp after logging in as sudo user, root is fine though.

Note: I can access and modify files using terminal as sudo user, its just an issue with sftp.

In this tutorial this command is recommended- sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/etc…

so could it be its only allowing www-data group for such directory? How can I change it so files have access via both sftp, www-data?

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.

nkatla

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alexdo • March 7, 2020

Hello, @nkatla

May I ask if you were able to edit the files via sFTP with the sudo user and at some point this stopped working or you’re trying to configure for the first time?

Which is the exact error that you’re receiving in the FTP client when trying to access the droplet/wordpress files? Have you checked the folder/files permissions as well?

I would recommend taking a look at this step by step guide on how to create a non-root user with sudo privileges:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-create-a-sudo-user-on-ubuntu-quickstart

Then you could use that user to connect via SFTP.

Hope this helps!

Regards, Alex

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