How can I find the password to www-data group to so I can change directory access rights?

Question

I am running Ubuntu on a Oracle Vbox in Windows 7 to develop a website. I have a set of directories that have Owner rw permissions but the group www-data does not have rights on the directories . I tried the command sudo chmod 640 /path-to-directory to change the status, but receive a message requesting my www-data password. My owner level password does not work and I do not know what this password might be. I tried passwd and receive the message 'changing the password for www-data and a prompt for my current unix password. When I enter it I get the error message

passwd: Authentication token manipulation error

passwd: password unchanged

This error message looks more like some sort of problem on my system, but everything else works fine.

Answer 1

You're doing it wrong (tm) :)

In your terminal window, look at the "command prompt":

username@hostname:~$

What is username there? You can also try entering whoami[Enter] to see your current username.

From you description it looks like you entered something like

sudo su www-data

or somehow else opened a console session as www-data user. This user has no rights to use sudo command, so your attempts at using sudo fail.

www-data user also has no password set by default, so it is impossible to log in directly as this user. Which is good. You do not want to give it a password.

You need to open another session as your user (or exit your current www-data session) and type the commands there:

sudo chown yourusername:www-data /path/to/directory

which will ask you for your login password.

(or, maybe, just move your stuff to /var/www which already has correct permissions. Then you can add your user to www-data group to get read-write privileges to that directory)