How do you run a PHP script as the owner?

Question

I'm sure there's a well-known answer for this, but I can't seem to find it.

How do I make a user's PHP scripts (in ~user/public_html, for example), run as the owner rather than as www-data ?

Assume Apache, Linux, and PHP 5

Answer 1

One option is to use suPHP.

http://www.suphp.org/DocumentationView.html?file=apache/INSTALL

The suPHP Apache module together with suPHP itself provides an easy way to run PHP scripts with different users on the same server.

It provides security, because the PHP scripts are not run with the rights of the webserver's user.