Permission for PHP scripts on a Commercial *nix Server

[Guardian]

Hi

I am the author of AZbb. Some of AZbb users are experiencing difficulties with file permissions on commercial *nix systems during installation.

I have been running AZbb on my own server (Apache2/win/php5) without problems. I have also installed it on a personal Linux OS without problems but never done so on a commercial one.

Info:
- The entire script reside in ONE directory /azbb and it does not require access to any other directories.
- AZbb does not use a database
- During the installation, and later on, scripts automatically creates a number of files and directories, all within the same /azbb directory.

I have had users who have installed it on nix servers with 755 for the /azbb and 644 for the individual php scripts as expected.

Then, there are others who have to set the permission for /azbb to 777 or else it would not be able to create the directories.

I presume that whether PHP is installed as CGI or Module may have a bearing on the matter.

Can anyone advise me, so that I can advise others, the best and proper permissions to set?

I would be really grateful if someone would actually go through the process and write a quick step-by-step guide for the users.

Many thanks indeed

[cryptofunk]

hmmm, noob here

see the apache error log, it is quite helping me when i have problem with web service

[skiddieleet]

I'm not that familiar with this but I have some thoughts. I would say that the users that have gotten it to work with 755 probably have their own user called apache on their machine, sort of like chrooted or whatever. So it has access to all the directories and can therefore create whatever it wants since it owns the directories. I have a couple of scripts from my home directory, and I have problems with uploads and stuff. I have to set any directory being uploaded or written to with permissions 777. I guess I could experiment by changing the owner to the user/group that apache uses and seeing if it can write to the dir's with less permissions that way. But this would be my guess as to how some users have it work fine on permissions of 755. I know it sucks, but for now you could maybe say in the installations instructions to set the perms to 777 during install then reset them to 755 after the install is complete. I wrote a really small bb system that isn't really released I just used it a bit on my own and wrote it for practice with php. My install script worked fine on windows, but I had to do all sorts of weird stuff on nix for it to work. Hope you figure out a good solution to the problem. Peace.

[Guardian]

Thank you for replying. I made some changes and had some advice and it is OK now.

Tnx

[dlab]

If you have ACLs enabled on the server, you can chmod 600 all files and chmod 700 all dirs, then setfacl -m u:www-data:rw all files, and setfacl -m u:www-data:rwx all subdirs.

But this is if you have ACLs enabled in the kernel for that FS and enabled in /etc/fstab