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I was trying to open a file and write to it with PHP at /var/wwwfolder but it wasn't working so I did

sudo chmod 777 /var/www

now I want to set the permissions for /var/www to the default.
what are the default permissions for /var/www?

Hossein Hosseinvand
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5 Answers5

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The default permission for /var/www itself is a pretty standard one: owner root:root and mod 755.

As for anything inside /var/www, that is one of the rare directories where you have the privilege of deciding for yourself what to put in it and what permissions everything in it should have. But what makes the most sense is:

  • Most files should be writable by whichever user or group is going to be writing to them most. You can set them to be owned by your user account. Or set up a custom group for your developers. Or if the files will be modified rarely and you want good security, you can go with root:root and just sudo in on the rare occasions they'll be modified.

  • Most files should not be world-writable. So, 644 for files, and 755 for directories is appropriate (or 664 and 775 if you want to give a group write access).

  • It is not recommended to set any of it to be writable by the web server, ie www-data, except for any specific files your web scripts to be able to write to. If so, it's better to set the user or group of those files to www-data than to make them world-writable. Note that any time the www-data user can write to any file within the web root, whether it's by setting the user or group on those files, or making them world-writable, it's a potential security problem. World-writable is just the worse of the two.

thomasrutter
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The permissions on this folder are:

chmod 755 /var/www/

and the files inside the folder are:

chmod 644 /var/www/file
chaos
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Make sure the group is www-data on '/var/www'.

sudo chgrp www-data /var/www

Make it writable

sudo chmod 775 /var/www

set group id for subfolders

sudo chmod g+s /var/www

add your username to the group

sudo useradd -G www-data [USERNAME]
OR
usermod -a -G www-data [USERNAME]

give yourself ownership

sudo chown [USERNAME] /var/www/
scubbo
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kamil
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    That is not the default permissions for /var/www, and it's a very bad idea security-wise to make the whole web root writable by www-data. Only do this when web scripts need write access to particular files, and even so only do it to those particular files, not to the entire web root. And the OP did not say he needed to do this, anyway, so this should not be a recommendation at all. – thomasrutter Jul 09 '14 at 02:03
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    Also it's a very bad idea to add yourself to the www-data group and treat that group in that manner. Where did you read to do this? It's particularly bad advice, almost maliciously so. Create your own groups when you need to give a group access to something: don't re-use the unprivileged groups that are intended for internal use by daemons. – thomasrutter Jul 09 '14 at 02:04
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    @neon_overload what do you recommend – aWebDeveloper Dec 07 '14 at 08:58
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    Exactly, what would your recommend @neon_overload? – Banago Jan 10 '15 at 15:45
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    @Banago personnaly I recommend a +1 :) – kamil Jan 10 '15 at 16:47
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    @Banago & aWebDeveloper did you see the answer I wrote to this question? Still have questions? – thomasrutter Jan 11 '15 at 00:09
  • @neon_overload, I did and it makes total sense. I was confused by the fast that /var/www was owned by root:root. But now permissions make a lot of sense to me. Thanks. – Banago Jan 11 '15 at 12:37
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sudo adduser $USER www-data
sudo chown root:root /var/www


sudo chown -R $USER:www-data /var/www/*
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www
Zanna
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parmod
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    Depending on the contents, it may be harmful to use the -R flag here. Since the OP did not use the -R flag, we should not recommend it to correct the wrong permissions they created. The -R flag is rarely helpful! – Zanna Nov 14 '19 at 07:08
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for what it's worth (I may be wrong-more testing to do) make sure that the files that you are transferring are "owned" by the user that logs in to BOTH machines. so for /var/www/website the webdir on the source machine is owned by kevin and the user on the dest machine was me too. i will do further testing once I have time. Thanks

Kevin Ridsdale
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