Owner of uploads directory is `www-data` but this prevents FTP access via PHP scripts

Question

To allow write access to Apache, I needed to chown www-data:www-data /var/www/mysite/uploads to my site's upload folder. This allows me to delete files from the folder via unlink() in a PHP script.

Unfortunately, this prevents another PHP script, which uses FTP functions, from working. I think it is because the FTP user is mike and now that the uploads directory is owned by www-data, mike cannot access it.

I added mike to the group www-data, but this does not fix the issue.

Can somebody advise me on how to allow PHP FTP functions to work in addition to file deletion using PHP's unlink() function?

Answer 1

That would be why, you need the 'write' permission to delete files. You have a couple of options here.

1. chwon /var/www/mysite/uploads to www-data:mike and chmod to 775 (rwxrwxr-x)
2. Create an ftp-write group and chown /var/www/mysite/uploads to www-data:ftp-write and chmod to 775
3. just chmod to 775 (rwxrwxr-x) and leave mike as part of the www-data group
4. set an acl on the folder for mike with setfacl -m user:mike:rwx
5. Create an ftp-write group, add mike and the group (as well as any other users that need these permissions with setfacl -m group:<ftp_group>:rwx

Answer 2

Filesystem permissions should be enough to fix your problem there. Try something like chmod o+rw on the uploads directory ONLY. The chmod command effectively says "give anyone that's not in the www-data group read and write permissions."

The longterm fix, though, would be to use a service account for your script that calls FTP, and to bundle that particular service account with www-data.