nobody and nogroup as directory owner when writing with php

Question

When executing a php script, that creates a directory the resulting file is owned by nobody and nogroup. I know that apache2 is executed as www-data on Ubuntu systems, so, why is my directory owned by nobody?

Thank you!

Answer 1

Even though nobody and nogroup sounds special, they are more or less a regular system user (nobody) and a regular system group (nogroup), much like www-data

When your created files have these owners, then most likely your php is executed as nobody instead of www-data. Check you webserver configuration. It might be possible, that apache is run as nobody, or, more likely, that you use some kind of cgi/fastcgi setup (like mod_fastcgi or a php5-fpm.