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I figured out who the current user was using PHP and managed to set the new directories' owner to be the user the PHP scripts are executed from. However, this was still causing issues as some other commands (used to determine who the current user was) weren't working. This highlighted that the problem was that my PHP distribution was configured to be in safe mode.

I disabled safe mode and the commands provided by Ed Manet allowed me to add/edit/remove the files as desired, without the shortcut of just having everything be 777 permissions.

Thanks for the help!

Original Post

I have a web application that stores some data on the server. This involves creating and removing both directories and files (as well modifying existing files) in PHP. The main problem I'm having is do with the permissions required to perform such actions.

If I set existing files' permissions to 777, then the PHP script can edit them just fine (although I know this isn't an optimal solution as it's insecure). The script can also create and remove directories just fine (when they have 777 permissions at least), but no matter what I do I cannot get the script to create new files.

I've done some searching around and it appears that I need to elevate the PHP "user" to a user that has the required priviliges. However, when it comes to server configuration and permissions I'm essentially a beginner. How would I change to a different user to perform the required actions? Is it possible to do this mid-script and use PHP's fopen() and chmod() functions as normal? Or would I have to spawn an entirely new process using a shell command, somehow getting that external program executing with the correct privileges?

To summarise, I need a new of creating, modifying and deleting files/directories in a we b server using PHP, by assigning adequate permissions to the files and privileges to the PHP user. I am unsure on how to do this.

Thank you.

Donald Whyte
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1 Answers1

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What I would do is change ownership of the folder that the PHP has to create files in to the account that runs the PHP process. Then you don't need to open up permissions so much.

So if this is a Linux system and the webserver is run by a user called "apache":

chown -R apache /path/to/the/files

Then change permissions to owner read/write

chmod -R 644 /path/to/the/files
Ed Manet
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  • Thanks, this (along with the PHP safe mode issue mentioned in the edited original post) helped me solve the problem! – Donald Whyte Jul 07 '12 at 17:17