chmod operation not permitted on /var/www/ SSH raspbian

Question

I am trying to setup a simple Apache web server over SSH in Raspbian but cannot obtain access to /var/www. I have tried these commands to obtain write permission:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www
chmod go-rwx /var/www

For chmod I got this error:

chmod: changing permissions of ‘/var/www’: Operation not permitted

For chown it didn't display any message, and appeared to do nothing. To recap, I am trying to figure out how to obtain access to use these commands and also to obtain access to that directory. I am logged in on the default user pi and haven't set a root password. Thanks in advance.

Solution

You need to use sudo with chmod as well:

sudo chmod go-rwx /var/www

Comments

[barlop]

what about sudo chmod.. And why does your example do sudo chown but not sudo chmod?