I have a AWS ec2 instance with Amazon Linux AMI running. As the web server I installed Apache and the web directory is /var/www/html.
Until now I had the permission for /var/www/html set as 777 under the user c2-user (chmod -R 777 /var/www/html).
I read, that you should usually have set the 644 permission for web access. But as soon as I do that, I get the 403 forbidden error message. What do I have to change?
The difference between '7' and '6' is the execute bit. That's important on directories because it allows other users to enter the directory. Since the dir is opened by ec2-user and Apache runs as another user, the third number (of 777) comes into play.
On individual files it may be okay to use permissions of 644, as that prevents other users from being able to modify the file. This isn't always true, though- executable files need the executable bit and logs need to be writeable by their process.
Here's a quick overview on directories and unix permissions: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/21251/why-do-directories-need-the-executable-x-permission-to-be-opene
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I am running a default t2.nano ec2 linux ami. Nothing is changed on it. I am trying to rsync my local changes to the server. There is a permissions issue that I don't know enough about to fix.
My structure is as follows. I'm trying to push my work to the technology directory. The technology directory is mapped to a staging domain. i.e. technology.staging.com
:/var/www/html/technology
this is from the root, and it does work fine, it's the rsync that is failing.
when I push locally to that directory I get a "failed: Permission denied (13)" error.
I'm running an nginx server and assigned permissions to the www directory as follows:
sudo chown -R nginx:nginx /var/www
My user is ec2-user which is the normal default. Here is where I am tripped up. You can see the var directory is given root access.
You can see that the www directory then has permissions set to nginx so our server can access the files. I believe I need to add the ec2-user to this directory as well as the nginx user so that I can rsync my files there and the server will still have access I'm just unsure of how to do that.
As a test, I created a test directory at this location and it worked successfully.
:/home/ec2-user/test
you can see the permission here are set for the ec2-user which is why it works i'm sure.
Here's the command I'm running on my local machine to rsync my files which fails.
rsync -azP -e "ssh -i /Users/username/devwork/company/comp.pem" company_technology/ ec2-user#1.2.3.4:/var/www/html/technology
Here's the command that was working.
rsync -azP -e "ssh -i /Users/username/devwork/company/comp.pem" company_technology/ ec2-user#1.2.3.4:/home/ec2-user/test
I have done enough research and testing to know that it's a permissions error, I just can't figure out the right way to solve it. Do I need to create a group and assign both the nginx and ec2-user to the group and then give that group the same permissions level on the :/var directory.
Side note, what permissions level do I set for the chown to make these permissions that are currently set?
I have server config files in the :/etc/nginx/conf.d/ directory that map to the directories I create inside of :/var/www/html directory so I can have multiple sites hosted on the server.
So in this example, I have a config file at :/etc/nginx/conf.d/technology.conf which maps to the directory at :/var/www/html/technology
Thank you in advance, again, I do feel like I have put forth the research and effort to show that I've gone as far as I know how to do.
The answer made sense after I spent roughly a day playing around. You have to give access to both the ec2-user and the nginx group. I believe you never want to put a user in a group that involves the server itself, I think things would go south.
After changing the owner to both the ec2-user and nginx group, it still didn't work exactly the way I wanted it to. The reason was, I needed the nginx permissions to be updated to what they had when they were assigned the user role.
Basically, theec2-user had write permissions and the server did not. we wanted the user to have write permissions so they could rsync my local files to the directory on the server, and the nginx group needed the same level of permissions to display the pages. Now that I think about it, the nginx group may have only needed read permissions to display things, but this at least solved the problem for now.
Here is the command I ran on the server to update the ownership and the permissions, as well as the output.
modify ownership
sudo chown -R ec2-user:nginx :/var/www/html/technology
modify permissions
sudo chmod -R o=rwx,g+rwx,o-w technology
The end result looks like this
You can see the permissions match, and the ownership is as we expected. The only thing I have to figure out is after I rsync new files to the server, I need to run the previous code to update the permissions again. I'm sure that will come to me later, but I hope this helps anyone in the same situation.
I want to install and use prestashop but now it only works correctly when I set permissions to 777 (I can login to the server via shell with root privileges). While installing I get this error "recursive write permissions for apache user on..." and only works for permissions set to 777. I don't like this idea because after installation I can't even change back to 755 or 775. I also get problem partly solved when I change the user ownership to apache but then I can't do anything with my ftp client with that folder.
The user owner is ftp and the group owner is psacln? How should I change the membership of the folders so I can work both through ftp and allow apache to do things with presta files? (and of course have the permission set not higher then to 775). BTW, do I have to restart a server when adding or removing user's membership of the group?
This should fix your problem.
ssh root#ip_address
chown -R www-data:ftp /var/www/prestashop
You don't need to restart the server.
Optional :
service apache2 reload
I gave the www group write permissions to a file but Apache still doesn't have write permissions to that file. However, if I give 'Others' write permission to that file (e.g. 0777 permission) Apache gets write permission to that file.
How can I fix this?
I am using Amazon Linux hosted by Amazon EC2.
There could be a lot of reasons for that...
Did you try to setenforce 0?
What if chmod o+w to that file?
Try that first, it will dismiss first guesses and common problems.
I am using FileZilla FTP to right click and change a directories File Permissions as I do on many other sites/servers. For some reason this is not working in Windows Azure. It outputs in FileZilla "500 'SITE CHMOD 777 (mydirectory)': command not understood"
Any ideas?
The Windows Azure portal has a "Console" for websites where you can execute some shell commands. One of them appears to be chmod (fileutils) 4.1. I was able to modify the permissions on a folder using this:
chmod -R 744 myfolder
I found a hack solution to delete files on Azure:
Stop your website from the management console (https://manage.windowsazure.com)
Open up the FTP site in Filezilla
Rename the directory that has the problem to anything else (Possibly an optional step, I dont know)
Delete the renamed directory
Restart your website.
That seems to do it.
Windows Azure Websites is a Windows Server based server. Thus, file permissions don't work like in Linux (as #SLaks already mentioned).
However, the account your scripts (PHP/ASP.NET/node.js) are executed under has full access to the folder /site/wwwroot, as does your FTP user. Meaning that from your PHP you can do all fully privileged file access operations - Read, Write, Delete, Create, Create directories.
What you cannot do, and cannot be changed, is to execute scripts (which 0777 would give you in Linux).
I just learned to install Apache 2 on my ubuntu linux localhost for the first time. I'm making it work with PHP5.
I noticed that anytime I want to write to a file or directory, I have to chmod 777 the destination.
But from my experience working on 3rd party hosting solutions, I am generally allowed to write to files and dirs that have 755 permissions.
What can I do on my localhost so that I can write to files and dirs with 755 permissions? If the answer to this is very long, can someone send me a link to a step by step guide to do this?
Here are some simple rules for web site content management (under apache) that most people should follow:
All content should be chown'd & chgrp'd to the same user that apache is running as. On new ubuntu installs , the user and group are both "www-data".
If you want to administer the serving files under your own user group, then you should add youself to the www-data group, and make sure that users in this group have read/write access to all the serving files and directories. The caveat here is that you want to make sure not to create new files as your personal account. These should still be owned by www-data. The easiest way to accomplish this is to create the file as yourself, and then chown it to www-data:www-data.
If you do these 2 things, then you should be able to write to files that are being served by apache. I'm not sure where your document root is, but something like this would likely work for most simple installs:
$ sudo usermod $USER -a -G www-data
$ cd /var/www
$ sudo chown -R www-data:www-data .
You probably can't achieve this because the owner of the file is different than the user trying to perform an action on the file.
the permissions are:
owner-group-everyone
rwx-rwx-rwx
i.e. 111 = 7 which allows read/write and execute.
101 = 5 which is just read and execute
you can't write to the file because your logged in user isn't part of the owner/group that has access to the file.
the final 7 (i.e. rwx-rwx-111(7)) means that globally, everyone has read/write access to that file.
how to fix this
In Linux, you can use the chown or chgrp command to achieve your desired results.
First, you will want to find out as which user your PHP code is running. If you are using mod_php5 (package name libapache2-mod-php5) with Apache to run with the "worker" or the "prefork" MPM, this will probably be www-data.
This is no big problem as long as you only run one web application within the server. However, if you run multiple applications (or scripts that are owned by more than one user), you are setting yourself up for all kinds of security-related "fun".