Best and Proper Permissions Settings for Directory

Question

I am interested in knowing the proper, yet security-conscious settings for a directory. Here's my scenario:

1. I have a username for FTP access to my server called "user".
2. For the purpose of the scenario, PHP runs as "nobody" on my server.
3. I have a directory off the document root called "sample".
4. The "sample" directory is chmod'd at 0755 (drwxr-xr-x)
5. "Sample" is owned by "user" and the group is set to "user"

The above is all very straight forward and standard.

So I want to have a script be able to create (mkdir) and delete (rmdir) directories under "sample". Yet, I don't want to obviously overly expose my server by opening up the permissions (I could easily chmod sample to 0777 and make it world write-able).

What is the best combination of permissions, owner settings and/or group settings to allow my script to create and delete directories under "sample" while retaining the ability for "user" to continue to FTP into the directory?

Thanks.

Answer 1

The best would be to run the script as user "user". If you are using Apache, this can be done using the suEXEC module: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/suexec.html.

To use PHP, you have to run PHP as CGI. Usually, this means disabling mod_php, but eventually there is a way to switch between mod_php and php-cgi with different extensions (e.g. .cgi or .phpcgi). Haven't tried it, so it's just an idea.

Answer 2

In situations like this I've used PHP's FTP client support to do the actual file work. So basically I let PHP do the uploading normally to a directory that it can write to. Then from there I use FTP locally to move the file to the appropriate location (after validating the file). This works best if you aren't exposing FTP to the outside world.

Answer 3

This might already be what your doing but, here is a thought. If the contents of sample are only to be accessed via FTP then you can move that directory outside the web server's document root and use your 0775 with owner=user and group=nobody plan. The php script will be able to write, user will be able to use FTP and the outside world will not be able to get at sample through the web server.