Question
Why does one need to usermod to www-data
- Posted December 28, 2020
- DigitalOcean DropletsServer OptimizationQuickstart
In many tutorials around the DO knowledge base you get a suggestion to first do
sudo usermod -aG www-data $USER
and then do
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/
In one of my older droplets all I did was simply
sudo chown -R $USER /var/www/
and never had any problems.
Am I missing something here?
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Hi there @louigiverona,
This is needed as most web servers like Nginx and Apache run as the
www-datauser. So if thewww-datauser does not have write permissions to the document root, your website might not work as expected.In some cases, if you have a static website that does not write files this is not needed.
You can find the user that your web server is running as with the
ps auxcommand for example.Another option is to change the user that the web server is running with and set it to your user instead. That way you will not use the
www-datauser but the one that you created. Of course, never set the web server to run asrootas this is going to be a huge security concern.Hope that this helps. Regards, Bobby