Permission Denied when downloading Drupal

Question

 /var/www$ wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-7.0.tar.gz

This results in:

    --2012-02-08 21:20:17--  http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-7.0.tar.gz
Resolving ftp.drupal.org... 64.50.233.100, 64.50.236.52
Connecting to ftp.drupal.org|64.50.233.100|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 2728271 (2.6M) [application/x-gzip]
drupal-7.0.tar.gz: Permission denied

Cannot write to `drupal-7.0.tar.gz' (Permission denied).
eyedea@eyedea-ER912AA-ABA-SR1810NX-NA620:/var/www$ ^C
eyedea@eyedea-ER912AA-ABA-SR1810NX-NA620:/var/www$ wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-7.0.tar.gz
--2012-02-08 21:46:34--  http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-7.0.tar.gz
Resolving ftp.drupal.org... 64.50.236.52, 64.50.233.100
Connecting to ftp.drupal.org|64.50.236.52|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 2728271 (2.6M) [application/x-gzip]
drupal-7.0.tar.gz: Permission denied

Cannot write to `drupal-7.0.tar.gz' (Permission denied).

I checked the permissions of /var/www and i can't change them. What's going on here?

Answer 1

It's totally normal. your /var/www directory belongs to root user and root group with those rights drwxr-xr-x.

It's far more better to have /var/www belonging to root, because it will forbid possible security flaws in apache or php to write and change source code on this server.

What you can do about that :

1. Make your wget with root rights. For instance :

   $ sudo wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-7.0.tar.gz or

   $ su -c "wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-7.0.tar.gz"

2. Download it from your $HOME and untar it afterwards

   $ cd ~; wget http://ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-7.0.tar.gz

3. Ignore those security recommendations and change rights of /var/www

   $ sudo chown `id -u`:`id -g` /var/www

EDIT : If you have broken your /var/www tree with a chmod -R 777 /var/www/* and haven't burn in hell, you can thank god and quickly execute those commands before he comes for you :

$ sudo find /var/www -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
$ sudo find /var/www -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;