permission denied upon mkdir

Question

I use mkdir() to create a directory on my server:

// $var_name is equal to an md5() hash
$path = "/var/www/publish/" . $var_name;
if(mkdir($path)) {
  echo "success";
} else {
  echo "error";
}

This will yield an error due to a permission denied. Looking up on my server, by doing ls -lh

drwxr-xr-x  2 root     root   4.0K Aug 17 09:05   publish

But if my $path is equal to $path = "/var/www/" . $var_name; it will create the folder I expected. What seems to be the issue in here.

Solution 1

The permissions for the /var/www/publish folder are wrong. You need to make sure the apache user has the required permissions to create a directory.

You are able to create directories in /var/www/ as it will have different permissions.

Check the name of the user that the httpd process is running as and chown -R user:group /var/www/publish to that user/group. On debian, this appears to be www-data/www-data, so you need to run the following command chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/publish.

Solution 2

when using mkdir() with PHP it is executed with apache user (www-data on ubuntu), you may set the same rights on publish that you have on /var/www using chown

on ubuntu :

chown www-data.www-data /var/www/publish

Regards

mimiz