Whats the simplest way to edit and add files to “/var/www”?

Question

Having installed the web server is there a simple way to set a user able to use the graphic interface to copy files and directories to the local web server /var/www

I gave myself administrative privileges in Ubuntu but it still doesn't allow copies.

Related (more secure): How to avoid using sudo when working in /var/www?

Jorge Castro · Answer 1 · 2012-04-03 18:48:34Z

up vote 37 down vote

If you make /var/www writeable by its group and add the user to the group, that user will not have to use sudo. Try this:

sudo adduser <username> www-data
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www
sudo chmod -R g+rw /var/www

The user should then be able to edit /var/www/ files without hassle.

The first line adds the user to the www-data group, the second line clears up any files with messed up ownership, and the third makes it so that all users who are members of the www-data group can read and write all files in /var/www.

edited Apr 3 '12 at 18:48

Jorge Castro
24.1k50219442

answered Jul 1 '11 at 1:14

Azendale
3,073928

7

I do this, plus a few twists:

sudo adduser <username> www-data;
sudo chgrp -R www-data /var/www;
sudo chmod -R g+rw /var/www;
find /var/www -type d -print0 | sudo xargs -0 chmod g+s

logout and login again to pick up your new group. I do the chmod g+s to force new files and directories to pick up the group owner (www-data), making sure that my permissions change propagates. – Don Faulkner Apr 4 '12 at 2:54

This is less graphical but it's certainly a more efficient thing to do than use nautlius as sudo :) +1 for this – itsols Oct 15 '12 at 11:37

@azendale As simple as it may sound, I still cannot seem to write any files into my www folder. I wonder what I'm missing... – itsols Oct 15 '12 at 14:51

2

@DonFaulkner For security reasons, it's probably better keep /var/www owned by root:root, so instead of sudo chgrp -R www-data /var/www it better be sudo chgrp -R www-data /var/www/*. – Desmond Hume Nov 12 '12 at 14:42

@DesmondHume, that depends on what you're doing. A root owner will kill any web app that needs write access to the file system. Of course, that's also a big attack vector. One model I've seen creates a separate vhost & user:group for each web app, providing some separation at least. You can still add the developers to the group for the apps they're working on. – Don Faulkner Nov 18 '12 at 18:57

show 2 more comments

karthick87 · Answer 2 · 2011-01-03 20:54:52Z

up vote 6 down vote

Method 1:

Press ALT+F2 and enter gksudo nautilus and then click Run.
It will open nautilus with root previleges.
Goto Filesystem → var → www and now you can add/copy/paste your files.

Method 2:

Install nautilus-gksu
After installing type nautilus -q in your terminal to refresh right click menus.
Now you will find 'Open as administrator' entry in your nautilus right-click menu.
When you need to open any files with root permission, you just have to right-click on that file/folder and select 'Open as Administrator'.
It will open that file/folder with root permission.

edited Jan 3 '11 at 20:54

answered Jan 3 '11 at 19:55

karthick87
7,568855138

1

This is definitely the right way to go! I wonder why this wasn't the selected answer. The other methods involve messing with the permissions and I wouldn't risk my system by doing so. +1 for your answer. – itsols Jun 11 '12 at 15:13

1

@itsols: I completely disagree - you risk your system by granting Nautilus complete root access to your filesystem instead of properly configuring permissions to allow access to /var/www. One accidental push of the [delete] key and you could end up with an unbootable system. – Nathan Osman Oct 12 '12 at 0:43

@GeorgeEdison But this is only to set the permission. And after this is done, we close nautilus and work as usual. Is this really that bad? Excuse me for my ignorance here. Despite being an Ubuntu user since version 5.x, I still find setting up a development machine quite challenging and there seems to be no clear-cut way of doing it (for me, at least... – itsols Oct 15 '12 at 11:36

@itsols: The second part of this answer is the preferred method and is the one I use. – Nathan Osman Oct 15 '12 at 18:00

Marcos Roriz · Answer 3 · 2011-01-05 11:02:36Z

You can chown, that is change the owner of that folder. This will allow you to change the user and group of the folder, allowing your user to add/remove files on it. To do it, replace yourusername with your name and run:

sudo chown yourusername.users /var/www

And thats it.

However, I preffer to create a virtualhost in my home folder, it's much easier.

Basically it allows you to use any folder as a apache serving folder. To show it how it simple, lets assume that your username is username and that the folder that you want to serve is /home/username/www

Create the following file (for instance mywebprojects) in /etc/apache2/sistes-available replacing the username and the folder path (basically just copy and paste and replace in #CHANGE HERE):

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost

    # CHANGE HERE
    DocumentRoot /home/username/www

    <Directory />
        Options FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
    </Directory>

    # CHANGE HERE
    <Directory /home/username/www/>
        Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
        AllowOverride None
        Order allow,deny
        allow from all
    </Directory>

    ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
    <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
        AllowOverride None
        Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>

    ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error.log

    # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
    # alert, emerg.
    LogLevel warn

    CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access.log combined

    Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
    <Directory "/usr/share/doc/">
        Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
        Order deny,allow
        Deny from all
        Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
    </Directory>

</VirtualHost>

Now lets create the www folder, add a simple hello world, disable the default website (/var/www), enable our website mywebprojects and restart apache.

mkdir ~/www 
echo "<html><h1>Hello World</h1></html>" > ~/www/test.html
sudo a2dissite default #
sudo a2ensite mywebprojects
sudo service apache2 restart

And that it, now you dont need to go to /var/www, you simply add files to your www (or other givename) and it's already there :).

exactly what I did. One plus for this is you can change the directory to a shared drive so all files will be available when booted in Windows/OSX.

score 4 · Answer 4 · 2012-10-24 00:22:42Z

It could be as simple as sudo usermod -a -G developers $username using ACL.

That takes a little work, though, to start. This is for Ubuntu 10.10 at least. First mount the file systems with the acl option in /etc/fstab.

sudo vim /etc/fstab

UUID=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx / ext4 defaults,acl 0 1

sudo mount -o remount,acl /

Then make a group to which a user may belong for this purpose.

sudo groupadd developers
sudo usermod -a -G developers $username

The user needs to log out and in again to become a member of the developers group.

Of course, do not do this if you have content in the /var/www directory that you want, but just to illustrate setting it up to start:

sudo rm -rf /var/www
sudo mkdir -p /var/www/public
sudo chown -R root:developers /var/www/public
sudo chmod 0775 /var/www/public
sudo chmod g+s /var/www/public
sudo setfacl -d -m u::rwx,g::rwx,o::r-x /var/www/public

Then replace references to "/var/www" with "/var/www/public" in a config file and reload.

sudo vim /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default
sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 reload

If we wanted to restrict delete and rename from all but the user who created the file:

sudo chmod +t /var/www/public

This way, if we want to create directories for frameworks that exist outside the Apache document root or maybe create server-writable directories, it's still easy.

Apache-writable logs directory:

sudo mkdir /var/www/logs
sudo chgrp www-data /var/www/logs
sudo chmod 0770 /var/www/logs

Apache-readable library directory:

sudo mkdir /var/www/lib
sudo chgrp www-data /var/www/logs
sudo chmod 0750 /var/www/logs

aneeshep · Answer 5 · 2011-01-05 10:31:37Z

up vote 1 down vote

You may also want to look in to these posts:

Apache symlinked to home directory - Permission Errors

Apache2 Server Question (Shared Hosting Locally?)

answered Jan 5 '11 at 10:31

aneeshep
7,13611642

John Hallquist · Answer 6 · 2012-08-24 00:38:06Z

up vote 0 down vote

If you're using the server version, try webmin. It has a great web UI and file manager. Either that or Filezilla

answered Aug 24 '12 at 0:38

John Hallquist
1

2

Can you explain "If you're using the server version"? Any package that can be installed on Ubuntu Server can be installed on the desktop version of Ubuntu. – Eliah Kagan Aug 24 '12 at 0:45

Aditya · Answer 7 · 2013-04-08 14:34:33Z

Easiest way to do is follow the steps given below:-

Press Alt + Ctrl + T and terminal will open and type sudo -s and login with your password.
Now you're logged in as root.
Now type in nautilus and it will open the home folder for you as root. So now you can easily edit the files and do whatever you want.

Hope this helps. :)

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Whats the simplest way to edit and add files to “/var/www”?

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