"/var/www/html" permission question

[Les Mikesell]

On Sat, 2006-08-05 at 09:02, Deepak Shrestha wrote:
> Thanks for all the suggestions but I am bit confused here. May be I
> should have asked the question in different way. In general what I
> wanted to know is, how the root will give permission to group of web
> developers (supposing PHP developers) in "/var/www/html" directory so
> that they can read/write/modify the contents. In formal words, what is
> the best practices for this? Do web developers do their jobs in other
> machine than the one which is hosting web, then root will pour the
> content after the job is finished???
> 
> I am asking this because it is possible to directly edit the web
> contents in windows machines (supposing using IIS, dreamweaver).
> 
> In linux I guess the question is more on the ownership of ceratin
> directory (who own what and how secure when its live in the web??)

There are other considerations, especially if there multiple
developers.  One is how to test changes before putting them
into productions, and another is how to revert to a working
version if (when...) errors slip through the testing.  If
one person is doing everything he'll probably be the one that
has to fix it, but if you have a team, one member's change may
break something and not be obvious to the person that sees
the resulting problem or is supposed to fix it.

One approach is to let everyone work in their own workspace,
using a version control system like subversion or CVS to
integrate the changes and a test server that can be updated
from the version control system.  A number of ways can be used
to copy from the test site to production.  If both are virtual
servers on the same box you might just copy the files - or
update to the same tag from the version control system.  If
there are multiple servers or they are remote, you might want
to use a scripted rsync command to push the update out.  In
any case you want a way to restore an earlier working version
keeping in mind that you might push several versions before
someone notices the part that doesn't work.  An underlying
version control system gives you that, along with the ability
to see what changes had been made and who made them.

-- 
  Les Mikesell
   lesmikesell at gmail.com