I need to grant permission to my export directory to write to webserver, but I don't know what that is

Question

I am installing a rather complicated program that writes to a directory and this directory needs to be able to write to my webserver. My instructions say this:

Grant php/export directory permission to write to webserver:

sudo chown www /usr/local/share/stacks/php/export   #this command assumes your webserver is www

So... I tried that with www and that clearly didn't work. It says that www is an invalid user. Any idea what I'm supposed to put in there? How do i figure out what my webserver is. I have apache2, if that matters, and mysql is running (does that matter?). This is a dedicated linux machine running 11.10.

Sorry if this question is a bit dumb. I'm still learning linux, and I suspect that these instructions are intentionally obtuse because they would prefer to be paid to run these analyses for you instead of running them yourself.

Answer 1

Apache runs as www-data, not www. Furthermore, /var/www is the webroot of the server, so unless you linked /usr/local/share/stacks/php to the public in some way, you're not going to get it to work.