Permission denied writing files through sftp

The above method DIDNT work for me on Ubuntu 18. It started giving me permission denied error instead.

This question was answered by @sierracircle:

you could try this:

make sure your user is a member of the www-data group:

sudo usermod -a -G www-data $USER

then give group permissions:

sudo chmod -R 775 /var/www

You can see the comment here.

I use MobaXterm and I was getting this error when trying to upload a file from my Windows XP file system to a CentOS 7.2 droplet. Error: “SFTP error #1: Permission denied”. I run Apache 2. After finding this document I tried the “sudo usermod -a -G www-data $USER” command and I got the response:

usermod: group 'www-data' does not exist

So I tried using this command:

$ sudo usermod -a -G www $USER

…and it worked. Also I checked the sudo file using: visudo but I didn’t see the user listed in the www group. But it seemed to work.