Site folder permissions - non FQ

[johnfl68]

Hello:

I thought I would ask here as well, I know there are many helpful people here.

On a non-FQ server, for /var/www what user/group do YOU run as?

root:root
user:user
root:www-data
www-data:www-data
somethingelse:somethingelse

I am migrating to a new server with SSD drives and latest Ubuntu, but having some file writing permission issues. On the old server, some things are owned by root and some are user. I have crontab running perl scripts that write to /var/www throughout the day, and some things are not being written on the new server.

I have been searching, and there are so many different ways to do the ownership of /var/www that I don't know what is the best answer.

I want to clean house so to speak, so that I can do a global permissions change to everything in /var/www but not sure what is best.

Your thoughts on this are appreciated.

Thanks!

John

[hobbes]

You always want to avoid giving anything root permission if you don't have to.

Many systems setup a separate "web" user/group (e.g., www-data), which is what the HTTP process runs under and the files are owned by.

On shared servers, you may find the files owned by individual user accounts.

Bottom line, if this is all your own stuff anyway and it won't be shared by others, go with www-data:www-data (unless it's already being used for something else).