On Friday, July 7, 2017 5:25:29 AM CDT Nicolas Kovacs wrote:
Hi,
I have a series of websites hosted on two CentOS 7 servers, using Apache virtual hosts. One of these servers is a "sandbox" machine, to test things and to fiddle around.
Since Apache is running as system user 'apache' and system group 'apache', I thought it sensible that hosted files be owned by that process.
# ls -l /var/www/html/ total 24 drwxr-x---. 3 apache apache 4096 6 juil. 09:37 default drwxr-x---. 3 apache apache 4096 6 juil. 10:01 phpinfo drwxr-x---. 3 apache apache 4096 6 juil. 09:41 slackbox-mail drwxr-x---. 3 apache apache 4096 6 juil. 09:37 slackbox-site drwxr-x---. 3 apache apache 4096 6 juil. 09:42 unixbox-mail drwxr-x---. 3 apache apache 4096 6 juil. 09:38 unixbox-site
Hi Niki -
Pete Biggs has weighed in with one way of setting Apache permissions. His basic contention is right on: The user under which the Apache process runs should not have write permissions.
The method we adopted at my last job goes like this: All of our CentOS7 servers are members of Active Directory. We created an AD group which contains the user names of our web developers. We do not have any Web services that require writing data back to the server, so we do not have that complication to deal with. We also have nothing that writes to a database.
On the CentOS server everything is owned by nobody and has a group of devs@ad.com.
chown -R nobody:devs@ad.com /var/www/html
File permissions are 574. Note that owners are NOT required to have higher permissions than groups!
find /var/www/html -type f -exec chmod 574 {} ;
Directory permissions are 575. The eXecute bit must be set so that Apache can navigate into the subdirectories.
find /var/www/html -type d -exec chmod 575 {} ;
The group sticky bit is set on directories. That means any new directories created by the developers will have a group of devs@ad.com.
find /var/www/html -type d -exec chmod g+s {} ;
We also set ACLs on the directories so that new files and directories have the desired permissions. I don't remember the exact command for that. Setfacl is pretty finicky!
The end result can be a bit messy since new files in the html directory will be owned by the developer who copied them up. I have not found a way to force ownership to nobody. That doesn't matter, though, since Apache does not use owner permissions and web developers get permissions through the group settings. If you are picky about this, it is easy to set a cron job that runs chown on a regular basis.