So after hours and hours of looking around tons of links and websites, all pointing people in different directions in terms of “the correct” or “best practice” for file-permissions on a webserver, I still haven’t found a solid answer.

What also surprises me is that I have seen no real information in official documentations regarding such a vital aspect of configuring a webserver on nginx (or apache for that matter).

I have the following scenarios that will need to be taken care of:

• Of course my web-server needs to execute/read/write to files
• My nginx is run by www-data and /var/ww/html/ folder is owned by www-data user & group
• I need my deployment service to write/delete in /var/www/html. It has it’s own user and is a part of www-data group.
• I need my own user to be able to write/delete (when configuring, testing, changing, etc), without using sudo. I am also a part of www-data

Currently I’m inclined to use 775 on everything, but I know and feel this is wrong.

After running chmod 775 -R /var/www/html the permission syms looks weird: drwxrwsr-x (it seems to be an invalid one, and no online chmod calculator I have found can translate it to anything - they all say it’s invalid). The ls -la command in /var/www returns this:

mattias@jwlry:/var/www$ ls -la
total 12
drwxrwsr-x  3 www-data www-data 4096 Sep 24 17:05 .
drwxr-xr-x  14 root     root     4096 Sep 24 17:05 ..
drwxrwsr-x  4 www-data www-data 4096 Sep 25 09:45 html

Please enlighten me