Question

Owner and group in /var/www/html files and directories

Posted on April 24, 2021
Ubuntu 20.04
Asked by Shinichi Okada

Currently, one of the directories in the /var/www/html and index.php have the root as owner and group. And one of the directories has shin as owner and group.

The shin is in the sudo group.

The websites are working fine but I’d like to know if I should change all files and directories in the /var/www/html to owner:group to www-data.

I use a Git hook post-receive to deploy repo to the /var/www/html directory from the /home/shin directory.

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Bobby Iliev

Site Moderator

• April 25, 2021

Accepted Answer

Hi there,

What I usually do is to set the owner and the group to the www-data user only to the directories where my application needs to write to. For example this would be the images upload folder and the cache folder. This would depend on your specific application.

I believe that there would be no need to set the owner to www-data to all files and folders but only the ones that would be changed during runtime.

Hope that this helps!

Let me know if you have any questions. Regards, Bobby