Apache public_html question

[Charles Curley]

On Sat, Mar 24, 2007 at 10:06:19PM -0700, Don Russell wrote:
> I'm writing a small php web application at home and developing in my 
> public_html directory.
> 
> That works fine, except I'm trying to create a file from the php page. I 
> thought I'd be able to create a file in the same directory with the php 
> script, but the fopen(...,'wb') fails with a permission error.
> 
> I don't mind moving my development work into /var/www/html, but then my 
> problem is when I try to update the script from Dreamweaver on my other 
> machine, I don't know how to set up ftp so I get write access to /var/www
> 
> So... I need a solution for 1 or both of these:
> 
> 1 - How to I grant wite access to my public_html so the php web  page 
> can write to it?

You should probably give the fopen fuction a fully qualified path
name, say "/home/donr/public_html/foo.txt". Apache's home directory is
/var/www (as set in /etc/passwd).

Then, Apache runs as a non root user, apache. So you need to set
permissions for apache to write in that directory. so:

chmod o+w ~/public_html

That's the least secure way to do it: it lets any user on your
computer write to that directory. Somewhat more secure is to create a
group having only apache and you in it, and give it the group
ownership for public_html.

For even greater security, create a directory especially for files,
say "~/public_html/files", and treat it as above.

-- 

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