Giving PHP write permission in Apache

Question

I'm relatively new to configuring Apache.

I have a PHP script that writes a JSON file based on values retrieved from $_GET.

<?php

    file_put_contents('State.json', "{ do: '" . $_GET['do'] . "' }");

    echo "Success";

?>

I run that code by create an XHR request.

Ally.xhr('/Cream/Foam?do=someCommand');

The page it returns says failed to open stream: Permission denied on line 3.

<Directory "~/Dropbox/Web">
    Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews

    AllowOverride None

    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

Those are the permissions given to the root server folder.

What do I need to change to allow PHP to write the file?

(I have pretty much no idea what the block above means.)

Answer 1

You need to check if the user under which runs apache has permission to write into the directory.

So it's like this:

Your apache server is process. The process runs under some user (say www). The PHP runs under apache. So if you try to write into a directory in PHP it is the same as if the user www logs into the server and tries to create a file in the same directory. So check who is owner of that directory and which permission do it have. You can do it e.g. via ls -la command. If www will be owner of that directory, you will be 100% safe ...

Answer 2

You can try to set the permissions with

chmod function for php and set your directory to /var/www there you have normally enough permissions.

Answer 3

Check the file permission either in command line using:

ls -l /path/filename

Or through your ftp client if you have ftp access to the file/dir. If not, you could change the location like Stony said above.

Answer 4

Check the file/directory permissions that it is trying to write to. Make sure that it is writable by the user and/or group that the Apache process is running as.

Also check to see if SELinux is enabled by checking the contents of /selinux/enforce. If it is, either disable it or make sure the proper labels are set on the path that you are writing to.

Answer 5

Know that sometimes there is absolutely no way to get around this using PHP only.

The two solutions to this are:

1. Configure PHP and Apache permissions manually (warning: can get dirty very quickly).
2. Use FTP to change ownership to 0777 (full access) and then revert after running changes.

I've often found the latter option to work best.