User rights to update /var/www/

Thomas Cameron thomas.cameron at camerontech.com
Fri Aug 26 15:47:51 UTC 2005


> I have a new development server built to replace a Windows IIS server. I
> have a few users who update the web server over ftp through some
> developer application. On Windows I ran a small ftp server and they
> would do their updates. On the new server I have vsftpd running. What is
> the proper way to give them access to upload and overwrite files
> to /var/www?
>
> All the stuff (google and howtos) I'm finding on vsftpd is dealing with
> users getting to their home directories rather than another place in the
> file structure.
>
> Should I look at a different ftp server? wu-ftpd or proftpd? Still have
> the file rights issue I think.
>
> Other suggestions?
>
> Thanks,
> James

Probably not the answer you are looking for, but I *never* put any
production web pages into /var/www.

Instead, I set up virtual hosts and point them to /home/user/public_html
or something like that.  The reason is, I can set up as many virtual hosts
as I want and I never have to get funky with permissions.  Let's say I
have web sites foo.com, bar.com and baz.com.  I would create three users
called foo, bar and baz.  Their home directories are created
automagically, all I need to do is do chmod o+x /home/foo /home/bar
/home/baz.  When the webmaster logs in, they do everything through
~/public_html, which they have full access to.  If there are multiple
webmasters, they can either all log in as foo or whatever, or you can set
all their home directories to /home/whatever.

Look at the example virtual host in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf for how to
do this.

Thomas




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