Make /var/www accessible only for root and web server

Question

I'm a web developer. I'm allowing SSH access to my machine for a couple of people.

I want to make sure that they can't access my files in /var/www/.

So is it possible to make these files readable only to the web server and give read/write access to the root user?

Solution

I assume the Apache user is called www-data. If you want the files in /var/www/ to become readable only by this user, you need to give it ownership:

sudo chown -R www-data /var/www/

Now you want www-data to be the only user that can actually read/write those:

sudo chmod -R 700 /var/www/

Note that root always has read/write access to any file, regardless of the permissions. Whether this setup is a good idea or not – well, I'd rather chroot these SSH users to their home folders. See Can I create an SSH user which can access only certain directory?