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Jos
Asked: 2015-12-30 16:28:25 +0800 CST

Setting correct permissions on var/www/html/ [duplicate]

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After reinstalling 15.1 I have a lot of problems with my permissions. I constantly have to adjust them manually. That means I'm doing it wrong.

Here is what I do:

I create a folder. The permissions are: Owner: Me, Group: Jos (I'm the only user). Both have create and delete files. With those settings Joomla doesn't remove the installation folder. After manually removing it I get the error message: 

No configuration file found and no installation code available. Exiting...

Now I use the command:

sudo chown -R www-data:jos /var/www/html/my_site

Owner is now www-data (create and delete) Group is jos (create and delete). Installation works fine. Site works. But I can't do anything in it, as I am not the owner. www-data is, and I have only Access Files permission.

I am using Lamp.

How do I set it correctly?

permissions

1 Answers

  1. Your web user should not have write permission on your content, so to fix this what you should do is add yourself to the www-data group and then flip your chown command:

    sudo usermod -a -G www-data jos
sudo chown -R jos:www-data /var/www/html/my_site

    Then set your permissions to 2755 (directories) and 644 (files) or if you're wanting to be extra secure (or paranoid) 2750 and 640 respectively:

    find /var/www/html -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
find /var/www/html -type d -exec chmod 2755 {} \;

    This will allow your user (jos) to have the write permissions on the content, and the www-data user to have the read permission that it needs. This is also a better security practice as prohibits the www-data user from modifying content thus limiting damage a potential attacker could do. One other thing to note here is that if joomla or some other program does need to modify content in the /var/www/html/my_site folder, I'd recommend manually adding the write permissions to those files/directories only.

    chmod g+w /var/www/html/my_site/joomalwriteshere/

    Since I noticed you mentioned joomla here's a link to the source about their recommended permissions: https://docs.joomla.org/Verifying_permissions

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