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144

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.

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Related: askubuntu.com/questions/45496/… – Marco Ceppi♦ Nov 17 '11 at 19:15
1  
Related (more secure): How to avoid using sudo when working in /var/www? – Lekensteyn Aug 28 '12 at 18:56
    
I tried to do what Marcos Roriz Junior said. I copied and pasted when Marcos wrote and changed username to my username. But I cannot save it into /etc/apache2/sites-available because it wont allow me to save in that folder. ??? – user295291 Jun 20 '14 at 12:05
up vote 201 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+rwX /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.

If you are logged in as <username> you need to log out and log back in for the group membership to take effect.

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35  
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
14  
@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
2  
Weirdly enough, after running those 3 commands, some of my sub-folders and files (like composer.json and LICENSE) are displayed using the binary icon. Opening the composer.json in a text editor shows a blank file and the worst thing is that I can't browse some of the sub-folders either, I even tried the additional command as suggested by @DonFaulkner and still no luck. If I use the terminal as root everything is as it should be. Anyone has any ideas why this happens? – Alix Axel Jan 23 '13 at 4:35
5  
@itsols you have to log out and then log in for it to work. – jini Mar 13 '13 at 19:16
1  
@DonFaulkner - Would you mind elaborating on how having files owned by root might be an attack vector? (I'm new to all this, and I'm confused because some seem to advocate a when-in-doubt,-own-by-root approach to security, while others adamantly say don't-own-by-root.) – Andrew Cheong Apr 30 '14 at 3:08
up vote 23 down vote

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 :).

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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. – Jason Jan 5 '11 at 14:05
up vote 8 down vote

Method 1:

  • Press ALT+F2 and enter gksudo nautilus and then click Run.

    alt text

  • 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 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.

    alt text

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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
4  
@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
up vote 6 down vote

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
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Could you explain what's up with the UUID=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx-line? Is it meant to be added literally or do want the user to find the line and edit the options behind? – MadMike Oct 15 '13 at 7:34
    
Why don't you skip the sudo rm -rf /var/www-step. It doesn't really seem necessary . – MadMike Oct 15 '13 at 7:38
    
@MadMike it's meant to be filed in with hexadecimal digits. To find out what your various partitions are labelled, run sudo blkid – Azendale Oct 11 '14 at 6:41
1  
@Azendale When I wrote the comment it was meant as a suggestion on how to improve the answer. Today I know I should suggest this much more directly. Like: Please add on how to fill the UUID=xxxx-part like with a sudo blkid. – MadMike Oct 12 '14 at 21:08
up vote 0 down vote

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

  1. Press Alt + Ctrl + T and terminal will open and type sudo -s and login with your password.
  2. Now you're logged in as root.
  3. 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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1  
To get a root shell suitable for running graphical applications like Nautilus, sudo -i is preferable to sudo -s for the same reason sudo -H is preferable to sudo for running a single graphical app. (sudo -s doesn't reset HOME, so the user may get configuration files in their home directory that should belong to them but belong to root instead.) – Eliah Kagan Sep 13 '14 at 3:14
    
I strongly discourage using the root account, especially on servers. sudo provides more than adequate access controls whilst allowing the sysadmin to craft policy to ensure devs and designers are not handed a handgun to shoot their own (and their companies!) foot off – Shayne Aug 10 '17 at 8:01
up vote 0 down vote

/var/www folder is owned by the root.. you have to change the ownership to your own username for modifying files in this folder. For this you can try the following commands..

sudo -i // to change to root console

sudo chown -R <username> <path> // for eg. sudo chown -R scott /var/www/html (scott is the username, -R indicates recrusive)

Now the ownership of the folder /var/www/html will be assigned to the user scott. Now scott can copy/move files in this folder.

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up vote -1 down vote

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

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4  
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

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