Owner of NGINX process

November 7, 2017 16.6k views
Security Ubuntu 16.04 Ubuntu Nginx
mhampel
By:
mhampel

Hi there!

I’ve just installed nginx and wondering why there are two processes.
One process is owned by root, the other one is owned by www-data.

PID  USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S %CPU %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND
7017 root      20   0  124972   1432     80 S  0.0  0.3   0:00.00 nginx                                                                                       
7018 www-data  20   0  125332   3168   1588 S  0.0  0.6   0:00.00 nginx

I didn’t changed the nginx.conf yet, so the configured user is still www-data.

Is it correct that one process is owned by root? Is that a security risk I need to worry about?

Thank you very much!

  • Matthias
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2 Answers
jonleibowitz November 7, 2017

The process owned by root is the nginx parent process. This process forks worker processes which are run by the user defined in nginx.conf.

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Elizine November 8, 2017

The nginx process is running as www-data, so, the root:www-data ownership would only work with group write permissions set. There is no major issue with running with your web files owned by www-data:www-data but if you are concerned you could give ownership of wp-content to www-data and leave the rest of the install as root:www-data.

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