Ubuntu webserver permissions for writing

Question

While setting up my webserver I gave all my public folders 777 permissions with filezilla, I found out that this is very bad because everyone can put stuff in that folder at the moment. I have a website that has a fileupload form (laravel). I searched a bit around and found out I had to give the 'www-data' user the appropriate rights to write files.

So what is the www-data user? is it an user generated automaticly.

When changing permissions with an ftp client like filezilla to 777 whos permissoins am I setting ?

*NEVER SET 777!* If you are doing this, you're doing it wrong and don't have good permissions setups - time to redo your perms — Thomas Ward, Dec 10 '15 at 14:18
Please, Can you set here the routes/path to directory public? — Jose Carlos Ramos Carmenates, Dec 10 '15 at 21:50

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 10 '15 at 14:16

www-data is the user under which your Apache/Nginx runs.

Setting permissions to 777 grants read/write/execute access to the owner, the group and everyone else.

When only www-data needs access, you could change the owner of the file/folder and set permissions to something like 755.

This information might help: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system_permissions

Ubuntu webserver permissions for writing

1 Answers1