Question

I ran chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www and got 500 Internal Server Error

Posted on March 15, 2017
Ubuntu 16.04 WordPress
Asked by Andrew Obenreder

I ran chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www and got 500 Internal Server Error, get a file not found error on all of my domains and can’t seem to fix it.

I feel like it used the wrong path since everything is there but I’m not positive.

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Andrew Obenreder • March 16, 2017

Accepted Answer

Got it! It had changed the permission of the folder /var/www and the ownership of vhost files and folders also. Thanks folks!

Jonathan Tittle • March 16, 2017

@andrewobenreder @hansen

Starting a new reply as the other was maxed out.

Now that I can see the “File Not Found” using the IP address, that’s most likely an issue with NGINX, not Apache and also an issue with permissions. I’ve seen the same error on proxy setups with NGINX before and it falls back on PHP-FPM in most cases.

So if you have NGINX in front of Apache and setup as a proxy (NGINX on Port 80/443, Apache on Port 7080, etc), then I’d take a look at your PHP-FPM configuration and if possible, post that as well.

Specifically, we’d need to look at the location block that handles PHP connections for NGINX.

Andrew Obenreder • March 15, 2017

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