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I have a site which has a folder for google sitemaps. Recently I've been receiving the following error sent to me

Sitemap generate warnings:
File "sitemap.xml" cannot be saved. Please, make sure the directory "/var/www/vhosts/frrakns.com/sitemaps/en/" is writeable by web server.

Using ls -ld it shows the following owner and permissions

drwxrwxr-x 2 www-data www-data 4096 Jul  3 22:04 /var/www/vhosts/frrakns.com/sitemaps/en/

So I generally take this to mean the folder is owned by apache and both owner and group has write permissions. Where am I going wrong?

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  • Ah. So checking up the directory structure, they're all www-data:www-data until /var/www/vhosts, which is www-data:root. I take it that by changing the sitemaps folder to www-data:root this will work
    – Michael Millar
    Aug 28, 2015 at 7:35
  • @Rinzwind Of course www-data doesn't need write access to the directories above, only the execute (x) right is necessary there. But what user runs php? Is it included in apache or externally?
    – Jakob Lenfers
    Aug 28, 2015 at 7:36
  • www-data runs php. (just used echo exec('whoami');)
    – Michael Millar
    Aug 28, 2015 at 7:38
  • You can open a shell as www-data (sudo su - www-data -s /bin/bash) and try to create a file there to make sure you can access the directory and have write access. If that doesn't help, I would think it has nothing to do with your rights. The error sounds like access rights is just the most probable solution, not the one that was checked.
    – Jakob Lenfers
    Aug 28, 2015 at 7:48
  • @JakobLenfers thanks. I did that and could access + write in the directory. Do you have any pointers about where else I could look for a solution?
    – Michael Millar
    Aug 28, 2015 at 7:53

1 Answer 1

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I managed to stop the error messages and generate the sitemaps automatically.

When the server was created the cloud computing service provider had created a user. When I took control of the server I created my own user. The problem was fixed by setting the sitemap folders to be owned by the former user.

I still don't know why setting the folder to www-data:www-data wouldn't have worked and where to find the setting about this former user owning the sitemap generation process (apache or cron-related?)

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