Linux – Set server ACL folders 755 and files 644 permissions

It sounds from your description that the cron job just needs to read the files, which it should be able to do. Is the issue that you're trying to uncompress the files in place? Can you uncompress them to a temporary folder instead?

In order to modify the permissions of new files uploaded by FTP, you would need to change the umask of the FTP daemon process to 002. How to do that depends on the FTP server and Linux distribution.

After more research it seems like another (possibly better way) to answer this would be to setup the www folder like so.

1. sudo usermod -a -G developer user1 (add each user to developer group)
2. sudo chgrp -R developer /var/www/site.com/ so that developers can work in there
3. sudo chmod -R 2774 /var/www/site.com/ so that only developers can create/edit files (other/world can read)
4. sudo chgrp -R www-data /var/www/site.com/uploads so that www-data (apache/nginx) can create uploads.

Since git runs as whatever user is calling it, then as long as the user is in the "developer" group they should be able to create folders, edit PHP files, and manage the git repository.

Note: In step (3): '2' in 2774 means to 'set Group ID' for the directory. This causes new files and sub directories created within it to inherit the group ID of the parent directory (instead of the primary group of the user) Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setuid#setuid_and_setgid_on_directories