How do I add myself as co-owner of a directory on linux

Question

How do I add myself as co-owner of a directory? I set up a new apache server and need to transfer files to /var/www/html. The problem is, of course, I've denied root login but don't have sufficient privs to login and transfer files under my username.

Answer 1

There are a few ways to go about this. There are lots of ways to control access to files and directories on Linux systems. ;-)

You could create a group with permissions to edit the directory, and add yourself to it:

# create an 'htmleditors' group
groupadd htmleditors
# add 'anthony' to it
usermod -aG htmleditors anthony
# change the directory to be owned by the group
chgrp -R htmleditors /var/www/html
# grant read/write permissions to the group
chmod -R g+rw /var/www/html

Or you can use POSIX ACLs to just give yourself access:

# give 'anthony' Read/Write/eXecute permissions on all files in /var/www/html
setfacl -R -m u:anthony:rwX /var/www/html
# do the same for directories
find /var/www/html -type d | xargs setfacl -R -m d:u:anthony:rwX

You can even combine the two:

groupadd htmleditors
usermod -aG htmleditors anthony
setfacl -R -m g:htmleditors:rwX /var/www/html
find /var/www/html -type d | xargs setfacl -R -m d:g:htmleditors:rwX

See the man pages for the various commands used for more information about what exactly is going on.

Answer 2

man chown
man chgrp
man setfacl

generally the files should not be owned by apache and only writeable by the owner, in your case you

from point of security it is very bad if the webserver has write-permissions because it may lead after a small
breach in manipulated files wide opening the doors