Question

PHP error log issue chmod 777

Posted on July 30, 2015
Apache PHP
Asked by olliz

So I am trying to get PHP save error logs automatically to the directory where the script containing error is. But the problem is that error logs are not written unless I set permission 777 to all directories manually. And that is something I wouldn’t want to do due to security issues.

So I tried this

chgrp www-data /var/www
chmod g+w /var/www

But, unfortunately, it didn’t help. Any other advice?

Thank you!

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Ryan Quinn

DigitalOcean Employee

• June 10, 2016

Accepted Answer

This question was answered by @ryanpq:

Without a bit more information it’s difficult to know the exact problem but I do have a thought on how you might resolve this. Assuming that 1.) You are on Ubuntu and 2.) That this script is running via Apache or nginx you can set the ownership of the directory to www-data which is the user that the web server process is running as. Doing this should allow your script to write properly without setting 777 permissions.
chown -Rf www-data:www-data /var/www/html 
This will set the permissions for the entire default Apache web root.

View the original comment

olliz • March 26, 2017

This is quite old question, but asking here anyway since it’s strongly related. So the problem is that I need to use above command (chown -Rf www-data:www-data /var/www) every time after creating a new directory. Is it possible to make new directories automatically get the same ownership as the parent directory so that I wouldn’t need to manually run the command?