Question

Permission denied whenever uploading files

Posted October 9, 2014 63.5k views

I am running the LEMP Stack on Ubuntu 14.04

I am always getting permission denied whenever my php file is trying to save or upload something. If I chmod the folder to 777 it works but I don’t want to change it to 777. I checked the owner of all the files in my application . It is root / root (owner / group ).

I have the exact same project on a different server with permissions set as 0755 and the owner as 501 / 500 and the application works flawlessly. But I don’t know that the 501 / 500 stands for.

Also I just checked the following for my application:

/usr/share/nginx/html/example1/app/webroot
script owner : root
script getmyuid : 0
script getmygid : 0

How come the script owner is root and I still get permission denied ?

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keoki
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keoki

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7 answers
ryanpq October 9, 2014

By default the nginx process runs as the user www-data. Changing the ownership of your files and directories inside your web root to this user will allow nginx to create new files and directories in this path.

chown -Rf www-data.www-data /usr/share/nginx/html/*
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  • keoki October 9, 2014

    worked, thanks ! How can I know under which user a process runs ?

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  • ryanpq October 9, 2014

    One way is to run “top” when the process is running. It will indicate the user the process is being run by. On Ubuntu Apache and nginx always use the user www-data. On CentOS/Fedora the user is generally “httpd” by default.

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steadistone June 23, 2017

If you are running apache on Ubuntu 14.04 you want to invoke it as such

sudo chown -Rf www-data:www-data </var/www/html/*
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QIPlus December 30, 2018 
sudo chown -Rf www-data:www-data /var/www/html/*

This worked for me!

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mike712366 February 5, 2015

i have same problem . i trying to copy wordpress zip file but getting: scp: ./httpdocs.zip: Permission denied

I ran your command on my VPN but still the same.

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mike712366 February 6, 2015

its working.

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akangadnan October 16, 2019

can u help me??
i have same problem but i follow this tutorial but it does not bring results.

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amokenathaniel July 7, 2021

Hi , I had the same issue ..I couldn’t upload anything from my admin panel so I changed the permission on the media folder and gave all users full permission(to media folder).
I achieved that by executing this on my media folder…
sudo chmod -R a+rwx /media (path to your media folder) restarted everything then it worked . You can try it.

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