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Directory not writeable even though chown and chmod


StevenOliver

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On Ubuntu 20.04, I've done this a hundred times and it's always worked fine:
chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/html
usermod -aG www-data My_User_Name

Today, when trying to write a file in html, I get a "Directory '.' is not writeable" error.

All the directories are 755, all the files are 644, and I've verified I'm a member of www-data.

What am I missing, please?

Thank you.

p.s. I know I can do "chown -R MyUserName:MyUserName /var/www/html" and then I can write to the directory... but I'm trying to figure out why on earth the above suddenly won't work.
 

Edited by StevenOliver
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755 means: Owner can read, write, execute. Everyone else can read, execute.
When I stat my d and f:
755 drwxr-xr-x    www-data www-data    Aug  5 20:18 www
755 drwxr-xr-x www-data www-data Aug  5 20:19 html
644 -rw-r--r-- www-data www-data Aug  1 18:12 index.html

... and check if I'm a member of www-data....
$ groups //command line
My_User_Name sudo www-data // result

So, www-data owns the files. And, I'm a member of www-data. As a member of www-data, I should also be able to write. What am I missing?

Edited by StevenOliver
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7 hours ago, StevenOliver said:

755 means: Owner can read, write, execute. Everyone else can read, execute.

That's right: owner can write, everybody else cannot.

 

7 hours ago, StevenOliver said:

So, www-data owns the files. And, I'm a member of www-data. As a member of www-data, I should also be able to write. What am I missing?

www-data is the owner. Are you www-data?

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You did inherit the privileges of the www-data group. But the permissions you applied to allow writing are not for the www-data group. They are for the owner of the directory, and in this case the owner of the directory is www-data the user.

There is a user named "www-data" and there is a user group named "www-data". They are two separate (but related) things.

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Unfortunately, I have google searched this exact thing, and found too many conflicting "solutions." Each "solution" proposes a line of code, followed by, "well, this worked for me...". And, I don't want to mislearn yet another "hack." Rather, I'd like to know the correct way to do this.

So here is a properly worded question:

For a sudo user to create files in the /var/www/html directory of an Apache2/Ubuntu 20.04 cofiguration, what are the "best practices" lines of chmod and chown code to accomplish this?

Thank you

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A "sudo user" doesn't make sense. sudo is a tool that lets you run commands as another user - typically root.

Forget for a moment what you are trying to do. Why are you trying to do it? What is fiddling with permissions supposed to solve?

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