Preface
I use Git as a version control and deployment system. When a website gets pushed to a server, all files get pulled into the web root (i.e. htdocs) by a user named git executing git pull in the post-receive hook.
By default, all files and folders git creates have 664 and 775 permissions, respectively, and are owned by that user. 664 translates to the user and group being able to read and write, and everyone else only being able to read, and 775 translates to the user and group being able to read, write and execute, and everyone else only being able to read and execute. (That’s a mouthful!)
1 2 | -rw-rw-r-- 1 git git 30 Aug 15 23:04 test-file.txt drwxrwxr-x 1 git git 102 Aug 15 23:04 test-directory |
-rw-rw-r-- 1 git git 30 Aug 15 23:04 test-file.txt drwxrwxr-x 1 git git 102 Aug 15 23:04 test-directory
Now, in an instance where you need a folder in htdocs writable by another user, like apache, for let’s say a caching system, you need to be able to set those particular permissions accordingly.
To accomplish this, you really only have two options:
- Set permissions of files to 666 and folders to 777
- Set the owner or group to apache (or a group that apache is a member of)
Personally, I favor restrictive permissions over convenience, so option #1 is out, which means we’re going to take a look at how to implement option #2.