Advice on setting up a stage environment

[Nabeel Moidu]

On Sun, Jun 22, 2008 at 8:29 PM, mark <m.roth2006 at rcn.com> wrote:
> Nabeel Moidu wrote:
> <snip>
>> 1) Users should be able to upload files to the apache and tomcat root
>> ( of course without upsetting the default permissions on the folder (
>> 644 ) and ownership apache.apache and tomcat.tomcat )
>> 2) Any code uploaded( I'm using ftp here) by the php developers should
>> be automatically owned by apache user. And that uploaded by java
>> developers should be owned by tomcat user.
> <snip>
> I'm in a development environment, and what I do is make it owned by nobody, or
> apache, whatever, and group developers, and group writable. And we have it set
> up that they have sandbox directories to play in, /var/www/html/<username>
>
>        mark

Bram, Mark, Aaron

Thanks for the suggestions.

In the sgid and g+rw for doc root model, one issue I face is when
developers upload to tomcat a  .war and deploy it, it deploys as 644.
Often the developers undeploy and redeploy their apps via tomcat admin
web ui and then find that they can't write to any of the files ...(
and of course then
they come running ..."Where's that sys admin? I want to kill
him....He's revoked my access ;)

Two instances of ftp solves my issue here completely but in terms of
scalability , it would be an issue.
 Again if I need to run ftp for any other purpose other than the
developer's upload ,
 I'll have to go for a third instance coz the chown will modify all
file ownerships of uploaded files.

Can any of the version control softwares give a solution to the
ownership issue ? Or any other way of uploads to servers ?

Thanks in advance

Nabeel Moidu
Doha, Qatar