How do I figure out what user & group Apache is running as?

Question

On DreamHost shared hosting, I\'m setting up htpasswd, but Apache does not have permission to read the file. How do I give it permission? I want to either change the owner o

Answer 1

Actually, you don't need access to httpd.conf:

ps aux | grep apache2
groups apache_user

should yield what You want

Answer 2

I was having some issue that leads me to another solution. But it only works when you have access to the configuration file

We can actually check the user and group in \etc\apache2\envars file. This is where Apache set the environments var and use it across application.

Look for this two lines:

export APACHE_RUN_USER=www-data
export APACHE_RUN_GROUP=www-data

Note this is just setting environment variables. The actual setting the apache to run as what user/group is actually in the \etc\apache2\apache2.conf

User ${APACHE_RUN_USER}
Group ${APACHE_RUN_GROUP}

The location of the files might me different but you should get the idea.