linux - What's the best way of handling permissions for Apache 2's user www-data in /var/www?

Has anyone got a nice solution for handling files in /var/www? We're running Name Based Virtual Hosts and the Apache 2 user is www-data.

We've got two regular users & root. So when messing with files in /var/www, rather than having to...

chown -R www-data:www-data

...all the time, what's a good way of handling this?

Supplementary question: How hardcore do you then go on permissions?

This one has always been a problem in collaborative development environments.

Answer

Attempting to expand on @Zoredache's answer, as I give this a go myself:

• Create a new group (www-pub) and add the users to that group

  
  
  

  groupadd www-pub

  
  
  

  usermod -a -G www-pub usera ## must use -a to append to existing groups

  
  
  
  

  usermod -a -G www-pub userb

  
  
  

  groups usera ## display groups for user




• Change the ownership of everything under /var/www to root:www-pub

  
  
  

  chown -R root:www-pub /var/www ## -R for recursive




• Change the permissions of all the folders to 2775

  
  
  

  chmod 2775 /var/www ## 2=set group id, 7=rwx for owner (root), 7=rwx for group (www-pub), 5=rx for world (including apache www-data user)

  
  
  
  

  Set group ID (SETGID) bit (2) causes the group (www-pub) to be copied to all new files/folders created in that folder. Other options are SETUID (4) to copy the user id, and STICKY (1) which I think lets only the owner delete files.

  
  
  

  There's a -R recursive option, but that won't discriminate between files and folders, so you have to use find, like so:

  
  
  

  find /var/www -type d -exec chmod 2775 {} +




• Change all the files to 0664

  
  
  

  find /var/www -type f -exec chmod 0664 {} +




• Change the umask for your users to 0002

  
  
  
  

  The umask controls the default file creation permissions, 0002 means files will have 664 and directories 775. Setting this (by editing the umask line at the bottom of /etc/profile in my case) means files created by one user will be writable by other users in the www-group without needing to chmod them.

Test all this by creating a file and directory and verifying the owner, group and permissions with ls -l.

Note: You'll need to logout/in for changes to your groups to take effect!