I'm setting up a couple of wordpress installs and am habitually running into permission problems. I suspect the main problem is that I'm not a shared hosting environment, just a plain Ubuntu VM and so whatever the default settings are on Ubuntu is not what WP expects. Examples of problems:
- upgrades fail because apache doesn't have write permissions to the wp install
- themes and other uploads fail because new folders created have the wrong group membership or permissions
- cannot create directory wordpress/wp-content/upgrade
So far I've had to alter the default umask for apache to fix 2, chmod a setgroupid bit to fix 1, and I'm now looking into 3. My guess is that it's not supposed to be this hard. Am I missing some huge obvious configuration settings?
I set up a wordpress install with a user per class, to limit collateral damage while allowing teamwork and tinkering, so chmod 777 and other head-in-sand approaches are worse than the status quo.