Nginx – WordPress – Capistrano Permissions Issues

I think they should be chowned to www-data:www-data. This is somewhat more secure, because if your site gets compromised, and you had a file that was owned as root, and had the executable permissions, it would be a hell of a lot easier to run a command as root, than if all the files and directories were owned by a non-privileged user.

As long as nginx runs as www-data, you shouldn't have any trouble having the files owned by the same user

This sounds like a permissions issue to me, likely around groups. I go into detail in this tutorial, but the gist is below

First the script I use to reset permissions

chown -R tim:www-data *
find /var/www/wordpress -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find /var/www/wordpress -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
find /var/www/wordpress/wp-content/uploads -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;
find /var/www/wordpress/wp-content/plugins -type f -exec chmod 664 {} \;
find /var/www/wordpress/wp-content/themes -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;
chmod 440 /var/www/wordpress/wp-config.php
chmod -R g+s /var/www/wordpress/

Here are the main points from my tutorial - the information from that came from the wordpress.org website, mostly, I have references in my tutorial

• set owner to the user you created earlier, and group ownership to www-data
• Folder default is 755, standard
• File default is owner writable, readable by everyone
• Uploads folder writable by user and web server, so media can be uploaded by users
• Plugins folder writable by user and web server, so plugins can be added
• Themes folder only modifiable by owner