Linux – Enable apache to fopen/write in a directory

apache-2.2file-permissionslinuxpermissionsPHP

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.

Doh. I actually ended up doing..

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

Good question -- shows you've done your homework.

I can't think of anything "obvious" that you've failed to check, so I can only give you some more advanced debugging advice.

Fire up strace on the PHP process, and see exactly what it's doing under the hood.
Write a bit of code that does an fopen(..., 'r') to triple-check that your directory tree permissions are, in fact, OK.
su to the user in question and try doing some stuff on the command line. If that works, then you know your script isn't running with the permissions you think it is.
Check that there are no extended ACLs on the file, directory, or leading path components (getfacl is the tool to use). It's uncommon, but every once in a while they'll leap up and rip your face off. If you do have ACLs, use setfacl -x to get rid of them once you've verified they're unnecessary.

In order to get www-data group permissions you need to change the effective group of myuser.

Issue

newgrp www-data

and this should enable you to write in /usr/share/nginx/www.

It seems to me that the output of id will be updated (in Ubuntu) after you first change your group.