So I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, and something occurs to me.
There will only ever be one web server, but there could be multiple developers working on a website.

So instead of assigning the group to www-data, assign the user to www-data, and create a group dev-websitename and assign your development users to it.

Then you can easily give more permissions to the dev group, and restrict permissions to the owner. I don’t see why “Other” users ever need any access what so ever.

Here’s the code:

    sudo chown -R www-data:dev-mysitenamehere .
    sudo find . -type f -exec chmod 0460 {} \;
    sudo find . -type d -exec chmod 2570 {} \;

The 2 in the directory chmod makes it so files inherit the folder’s group

Now, the issue here is when you create new files as your user, their owner will be your user name, not the server’s name (www-data). But in some ways, this is ideal, forcing you to manually change the ownership of new files so that they are visible by the server. Of course you could always set git post.receive to do this for you too.

For “storage” folders or other folders the server needs access to you can use this mode so your server can also edit these files:

    sudo find storage -type f -exec chmod 0660 {} \;
    sudo find storage -type d -exec chmod 2770 {} \;

I have not sufficiently tested this method - it may be that there are downsides, but it just seems like it makes more sense to me. There will only be one server user, but there will be multiple developer users. So group makes sense for developers, while owner makes sense for the server, and other users have no business here.

@support795065

“how do you know what permission does that group/user have?”

from a command-line run:
id yourusername

it will return all of the groups that user belongs to

Is there an automated way to set these permissions properly for all folders?

I was poking for info on how ppl set their permissions, i have see a fair share of setups even on big shared hostings on many distributions.

The ones i liked are:
Webserver credentials: $webserveruser:www-data
user credentials : $username:$privateusergroup (same as username)
php pool credentials: same as user credentials.

Now for files:
Usually you have a root folder for the user (sort like homedir) and a root folder por serving web pages.
Something like:
/var/www/user1/html
/var/www/user2/html
/var/www/proyect1/html

Now, each “home dir” is owned by its own user, example /var/www/user2 is owned by user2:user2
Every subfolder too, exactly like a homedir, this is where many ppl get confused, how do you let the webserver read the files? (remember, php is using user credentials so it will always have full permissions on the working dir of the user, example, user2/html), Well..
Assign $webserveruser to each $privateusergroup, everytime you add an user, do:
usermod -aG $privateusergroup $webserveruser
not the other way around, its confusing because the privategroup has the same name as the user.
Now, you can set home dir to: chmod 710 /var/www/user2
and user2/html should have a default mask and permissions, example 75x, the root dir is already locked to others so it doesn’t matter. The webserver should be able to traverse a serve files, the user should not have problems using ftp with default mask and permissions, and php should be able to edit and read user files. Other users wont be able to read the files.

The other solution is using ACLs, but in the end its the exact same thing as my solution above, as setfacl will set a mask on the group permissions when setting a particular user or group access, it means the ‘extra’ permissions ser using acl will be controlled using the group permissions 'mask’, And the extra headche to manage ACLs on a server is not worth it in my exprience.

setguid and group traditionals groups like www-data are a problem when the owner of the root dir is the user as it can change or delete permissions.

If many users have to access proyect1 for example, ACLs can be used but i like to ser the owner of the proyect to a particular user or root, set a group for collaboration like $project1group, chmod g+s bit on that dir, set 770, and asign the $webserveruser and the users of the proyect to $project1group.

Pools!

That’s how I was able to accomplish serving user-owned files from a user’s directory.. I’m pretty sure this is how it is accomplished with WHM / cPanel.

There is a post “How To Host Multiple Websites Securely With Nginx And Php-fpm On Ubuntu 14.04” that includes a step for configuring PHP-FPM with user-specific pools.

I just copied the default /etc/php-fpm.d/www.conf to /etc/php-fpm.d/user.conf and updated a few values (note that I am using nginx for my setup - this should be replaced with the web server user, such as www-data):

[user]
user = user
group = user

listen = /run/php-fpm/user.sock
listen.owner = nginx
listen.group = nginx
listen.acl_users = nginx
listen.allowed_clients = 127.0.0.1

pm = dynamic
pm.max_children = 50
pm.start_servers = 5
pm.min_spare_servers = 5
pm.max_spare_servers = 35

slowlog = /var/log/php-fpm/user-slow.log

php_admin_value[error_log] = /var/log/php-fpm/user-error.log
php_admin_flag[log_errors] = on
php_value[session.save_handler] = files
php_value[session.save_path]    = /var/lib/php/fpm/session
php_value[soap.wsdl_cache_dir]  = /var/lib/php/fpm/wsdlcache

From there you just have to configure your (virtual) server to send PHP requests to your socket.

/run/php-fpm/user.sock

I’ve set up an Apache web server on Ubuntu 18.04. I faced permission problems running the webserver which is run by user www-data and files are owned by FTP user. After having trying different combinations for days. I think the best solution is to use http://mpm-itk.sesse.net/

To install: apt-get install apache2-mpm-itk

Then inside your directive of the host you assign user and group as below.

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName mydomain.com
DocumentRoot /var/www/mydomain.com
Options -Indexes
AssignUserID myusername mygroup
</VirtualHost>

Now with myusername you can use SSH, SFTP, Rysnc and since the Apache will be run as myusernam, you won’t face any permission problems

Not recommented:
Method 1. Another Solution I tried is to run the Apache webserver as user ‘myusername’, with this you can also avoid permission issue as you are also uploading the file with same user 'myusername’ over SFTP. But the problem here is when you login over SSH with 'myusername’ and after a while when you log out, Apache process is also terminated and with that website also goes down. But here I’ve a question at the bottom, would be glad if some one can explain.

Method 2. Assign user 'myusername’ a group of www-data, same as that of Apache.
Make everything inside /var/www/ own by user myusername and group: www-data
chown -R myusername:www-data /var/www
Make group has read, write, exec permission and set group id=2, which apply the group (www-data) to all new files/folders created in /var/www.
chmod 2775 /var/www
Most important part and nasty thing you have to do is change the unmask for the user 'myusername’. Add unmask 0002 in .profile file inside your home directory.

I hope someone finds it useful. Now my question to the Method 1, I have decribed above. When the user: myusername logs out of ssh it also stop the apache webserver. But it don’t happen with the user: www-data!! Just to test I’ve made the user www-data also logable from terminal. After loggin in with user www-data over ssh and logging out, the apache webserver is still running. Why?

I realize this is an old post, but it is one of the top search results on Google and I don’t feel like it has been adequately answered anywhere (lots of meandering to getting to the point). So I wrote a blog post on the topic:

http://cubicspot.blogspot.com/2017/05/secure-web-server-permissions-that-just.html

To summarize, the best balance between security and usability is to make the web root owned by root, create and assign a specific group to the web root, chmod 775 the web root, chmod g+s on the web root, and assign all users who need to edit files to the newly created group.

addgroup sftp-users
adduser youruser sftp-users
adduser anotheruser sftp-users

chown root /var/www
chgrp sftp-users /var/www
chmod 775 /var/www
chmod g+s /var/www

The g+s sets the “sticky bit” for the group, which correctly propagates the group and the permissions to all files (they’ll be 664) and directories (775) as they are created. The number of directories that need ‘www-data’ as the owner should be kept to a bare minimum.

Hi.
What I do to achieve read / write on the /var/www directory is, beside doing all the solutions given in above I like to set ACL’s on the directory, which solves my read/write problem for particular user.

For example :

setfacl -d -R -m u:amol:rwx /var/www

-d : Default ACL permissions applied on new files
-R : Apply the ACL permissions recursively
-m : To set permissions

Hope this will help. :)

I’m new in Digital Ocean and I successfully created droplet and set up an apache2 server I uploaded all my website files in var/www/html folder but while accessing my website I am getting “ This Page isn’t working error”
Droplet IP -139.59.56.242