CentOS php fopen permission denied error

I have almost the same setup and to make this work for all the application developers I used the following permissions

drwxr-xr-x 7 www-data www-data

my www-data user/group = your apache user/group

I also added the applications developers to the group www-data.

By the way, this is in my apache conf file (this keeps things more secure):

  <Location /somesite>
     DAV svn
     SVNParentPath /home/www/svn/somesite
     SVNListParentPath On
     AuthType Basic
     AuthName "Subversion Repository"
     AuthUserFile /home/www/svn/.htpasswd
     <Limit GET PROPFIND OPTIONS REPORT>
        Require valid-user               
     </Limit>
  </Location>

Test first that you can commit locally on your server and then remotely.

My first question is who owns the directory? is it Apache? If not, then you will probably have issue writing to that directory. Your next option is to allow group permissions to handle things -- is the owner in the www group? (Pardon if that is not the right name) If so, you can have the group permissions set to allow Apache and yourself to write (assuming that the owner is in the group).

As to public write -- that means that all users and services which are running on/logged in to that machine will be able to write to that directory. It does not mean that a malicious person operating outside of the machine will be able to futz with it... unless he happens to be able to sign on...