How do I give PHP write access to a directory

Question

I m trying to use PHP to create a file  but it isn t working  I am assuming this is because it doesn t have write access  it s always been the problem before   I tried to test if this was the problem by making the folder chmod 0777  but that just ended up making every script in that directory return a 500 error message until I changed it back  How do I give PHP write access to my file system so it can a create a file   Edit  It is hosted on Hostgator shared hosting using Apache   Edit 2  Someone asked for the code  The code is a GD image script  I know the rest of it works as previously I was creating the image every ime it was called  Now I am trying to create them when new text is added and save them to a folder  The write line I have is  imagejpeg null  file 85    I also created a test file to check if it was just a broken script  mainly copied from tizag   http   gearboxshow info rkr lesig jpg testfile txt  I don t know if how to post the code here properly  Here is the contents of the PHP script  minus PHP tags    It returns 13 13 1  separate lines   so it looks as if it thinks it wrote something  but the testfile txt is blank  I uploaded a blank one   or non-existent  if I delete it    Edit 3  The server runs CentOS

User · Answer

I m running Ubuntu  and as said above nobody nobody does not work on Ubuntu  You get the error   chown  invalid group   nobody nobody    Instead you should use the  nogroup   like   chown nobody nogroup  lt dirname gt

User · Answer

Simple 3-Step Solution     Abstract  You need to set the owner of the directory to the user that PHP uses  web server user       Step 1  Determine PHP User  Create a PHP file containing the following    lt  php echo  whoami     gt    Upload it to your web server  The output should be similar to the following   www-data   Therefore  the PHP user is www-data     Step 2  Determine Owner of Directory  Next  check the details of the web directory via the command line   ls -dl  var www example com public html example-folder   The result should be similar to the following   drwxrwxr-x 2 exampleuser1 exampleuser2 4096 Mar 29 16 34 example-folder   Therefore  the owner of the directory is exampleuser1     Step 3  Change Directory Owner to PHP User  Afterwards  change the owner of the web directory to the PHP user   sudo chown -R www-data  var www example com public html example-folder   Verify that the owner of the web directory has been changed   ls -dl  var www example com public html example-folder   The result should be similar to the following   drwxrwxr-x 2 www-data exampleuser2 4096 Mar 29 16 34 example-folder   Therefore  the owner of example-folder has successfully been changed to the PHP user  www-data     Done  PHP should now be able to write to the directory

User · Answer

chmod does not allow you to set ownership of a file   To set the ownership of the file you must use the chown command

User · Answer

Best way in giving write access to a directory     dst    path to directory   mkdir  dst    chown  dst   ownername    chgrp  dst   groupname    exec   find    dst   -type d -exec chmod 0777

User · Answer

An easy way is to let PHP create the directory itself in the first place    lt  php   dir    myDir        create new directory with 744 permissions if it does not exist yet     owner will be the user group the PHP script is run under  if    file exists  dir           mkdir   dir  0744        file put contents   dir   test txt    Hello File      This saves you the hassle with permissions

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I found out that with HostGator you have to set files to CMOD 644 and Folders to 755  Since I did this based on their tech support it works with HostGator

User · Answer

You can change the permissions of a folder with PHP s chmod    More information on how to use the command is here  http   php net manual en function chmod php  If you get a 500 Error when setting the permissions to 777  world writable   then it means your server is setup to prevent executing such files  This is done for security reasons  In that case  you will want to use 755 as the highest permissions on a file   If there is an error log file that is generated in the folder where you are executing the PHP document  you will want to view the last few entries  This will give you an idea where the script is failing   For help with PHP file manipulation  I use http   www tizag com phpT filewrite php as a resource

User · Answer

Set the owner of the directory to the user running apache  Often nobody on linux  chown nobody nobody  lt dirname gt    This way your folder will not be world writable  but still writable for apache

User · Answer

I had the same problem   As I was reluctant to give 0777 to my php directory  I create a tmp directory with rights 0777  where I create the files I need to write to   My php directory continue to be protected  If somebody hackes the tmp directory  the site continue to work as usual

User · Answer

1st Figure out which user is owning httpd process using the following command  ps aux   grep httpd   you will get a several line response like this   phpuser   17121  0 0  0 2 414060  7928          SN   03 49   0 00  usr sbin httpd   Here 1st column shows the user name  So now you know the user who is trying to write files  which is in this case phpuser You can now go ahead and set the permission for directory where your php script is trying to write something   sudo chown phpuser phpuser PhpCanWriteHere sudo chmod 755 PhpCanWriteHere

User · Answer

You can set selinux to permissive in order to analyze         setenforce 0   Selinux will log but permit acesses  So you can check the  var log audit audit log for details  Maybe you will need change selinux context  Fot this  you will use chcon command  If you need  show us your audit log to more detailed answer   Don t forget to enable selinux after you solved the problem  It better keep selinux enforced          setenforce 1

[php] How do I give PHP write access to a directory?

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