Enable apache to fopen/write in a directory?

Question

I just recently setup apache, I'm setting up a basic site and right now I'm having permissions issues. Firstly,

/www/ /www/sitename_com

are owned by meder:meder

and the permissions are 755 recursively ( or so I think ).

I setup a virtualhost, now in sitename_com there's a 'foo.php' and I'm trying to fopen ( create a new file ) within that directory.. it would be at

/www/sitename_com/en/file.xml

However Apache complains with:

Warning: fopen(en/file.xml) [function.fopen]: failed to open stream: Permission denied

www-user is Apache right? I need to give it permissions to my user group ( meder:meder .. not really a "group" )..

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Doh. I actually ended up doing..

1. chmod -R meder:www-data BETA_sitename_com/ KEY
2. chmod -R 770 BETA_sitename_com/

Does that look right? Any quirks? Seemed to work.

Answer 2

777 will definately get you write access to the file. To be properly secure however, you'd only want to make it 757 or 775 - whichever allows apache to write to the file.

Answer 3

One other idea you might consider is to use the apache 'user' configuration directive and run the apache website as the meder user. Files/directories could then be 644/755 permissions respectively.

Answer 4

Make dedicated VHost user for FTP file upload and with very limited privileges. Then set up apache to run vhost with user privileges either with suPHP or MPM-ITK.

Answer 5

If its a fopen command and php is involved you may check the php.ini