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I have a folder with files owned by: joe:www-data, joe belongs to the group.

Apache only seems to cooperate with www-data:www-data. Is there a way around this so I can keep the user as joe and the group as www-data?

Is it recommended to use this module below if I want to accomplish this task? Is this a good idea?

<IfModule unixd_module>
#
# If you wish httpd to run as a different user or group, you must run
# httpd as root initially and it will switch.  
#
# User/Group: The name (or #number) of the user/group to run httpd as.
# It is usually good practice to create a dedicated user and group for
# running httpd, as with most system services.
#
User daemon
Group daemon

</IfModule>
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  • What error are you actually encountering? You should be able to keep the html folders grouped as www-data and have Apache use them.
    – slm ♦
    Dec 1, 2013 at 1:27
  • Well I am deploying with the login joe, and the file permissions are joe:joe, I want to be able to chown to joe:www-data (Yet Apache will only read if its www-data:www-data
    – JREAM
    Dec 1, 2013 at 3:47
  • What are the permissions on your files? Giving the files to group www-data won't help if they're not readable to the group.
    – Ulrich Schwarz
    Dec 1, 2013 at 8:50

2 Answers 2

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Yes, you need to tell Apache to switch to your www-data group via the mechanism you found.

You could instead add joe to the daemon group and chgrp -R daemon the DocumentRoot containing the files you want to serve, but daemon is a general-purpose group. It's more secure to use a service-specific group, especially for so powerful a service as Apache.

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  • I am going to try this tomorrow it sounds cool :)
    – JREAM
    Dec 1, 2013 at 9:46
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You can also use apache2-mpm-itk which allows to customize Apache user and group used for each virtual host.

apt-get install apache2-mpm-itk

nano /etc/apache2/sites-available/mydomain.com

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin [email protected]
    ServerName mydomain.com
    ServerAlias www.mydomain.com
    DocumentRoot /home/myuser/mydomain.com
    Options -Indexes
    AssignUserID myuser mygroup
</VirtualHost>

See Create and set up an Apache virtual host for more details.

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