Should I use root to start my website?

Posted on January 23, 2015

Hi,

I’m in the process of learning how to use VPS to host my website. I have created LAMP stack and phpmyadmin and have my code ready. Aside from that, I haven’t created any additional users or set any additional security checkpoints yet.

I just wonder, is it ok to start my website, by using this “root” to upload all the file to the “/var/www/” folder and keep moving on from this? Or should I create another user?

Thank you so much!

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Egor Sazanovich

January 23, 2015

Your server works from www-data user (by default) and this user will not be able to access root’s files, so create new user (for example ‘myuser’) and add myuser to www-data usergroup. Anyway You shouldn’t use root access as default.