[CentOS] Is it bad for my web document folder to be user accessible?

[Les Mikesell]

On Mon, 2005-09-19 at 11:06, Dave Gutteridge wrote:
> PHP and MySQL seem to working on my CentOS installation.
> I'd like to install phpMyAdmin as well, so I downloaded the necessary
> files from phpMyAdmin's homepage and copied them to /var/www/html...
> 
> ... except that's where the process stopped. My regular user account
> doesn't have permission to write into the /var/www/html folder.

When you are installing programs you generally need to run as root.

> Should I just chmod the folder to 777? Is there a reason it's not
> already user accessible?

Most places should not be world-writable.  Better to change ownership
to whoever needs to write and make it writable by owner or group. If
it doesn't matter who sees it, you can make it world readable.

> This is a local machine where I'll be testing web pages of my own
> design, and not accessible from the web.
> 
> Or at least I hope not. If I'm running an Apache server just for local
> files, it's not being seen on the web, is it?

That depends on your firewalls and routing.  If you have a public
address, it probably is. 

-- 
  Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com