How to give program permission to write files??

[boon4376]

I've installed Apache2, PHP, MySQL and PHPMyAdmin to get a webserver up and running.

I've installed imagemagick and magickwand (allows me to edit images with PHP code).. The problem is when I go to save the edited image, I get an error:

Fatal error: magickwriteimage(): C API cannot write the image at MagickWand index 0 to filename "logo.jpg" (reason: unable to open image `/var/www/logo.jpg': Permission denied @ blob.c/OpenBlob/2480) [on C source line 374] in /var/www/testrotate.php on line 11

Basically if I set the security permissions on the www folder to allow anyone to make changes / read & write the program works fine... If I set security to normal I get the error above. Do I need to create a new user for the imagemagick program? How do I give it access to save images to the folder without letting "everyone" do it.

[Celauran]

You can either alter the permissions on /var/www or create virtual hosts in Apache with a DocumentRoot inside your home directory.

[ibuclaw]

I think what needs to be done is to create a directory inside /var/www with the user "www-data" as the owner or group with write access.
Then save the file in there, rather than directly in the root of /var/www.

ie:

sudo mkdir /var/www/data
sudo chgrp www-data /var/www/data
sudo chmod 2775 /var/www/data

Then update your code accordingly to save in that directory.


But as said above, virtual hosts may be the better way to go from a security view.

Regards
Iain

[boon4376]

I think what needs to be done is to create a directory inside /var/www with the user "www-data" as the owner or group with write access.

But as said above, virtual hosts may be the better way to go from a security view.

Regards
Iain

Thanks Iain, I'm a little bit of a newb when it comes to setting up a webserver in ubuntu, I havnt used virtual hosts before, but i've done some reading to understand them better.

Updating the security for www-data wasnt effective, nor when I created a folder inside of the www directory to assign permissions to, but still if permissions are set so Everyone has read / write capability, it works. Thus I dont think www-data is the correct user for the job?

Could you also go into further detail on how I would use virtual hosts to accomplish this task?

[jskandhari]

run the app as root "sudo" or open the saving directory as root and provide the permissions

[Celauran]

Could you also go into further detail on how I would use virtual hosts to accomplish this task?

Make a copy of /etc/apache2/sites-available/default, let's call it 'mysite'

sudo cp /etc/apache2/sites-available/default /etc/apache2/sites-available/mysite

Now you'll nee to edit the new file to point to your home directory. I've included a sample.

<VirtualHost *:80>
	ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
       ServerName mysite.example.com

	DocumentRoot /home/username/mysite
	<Directory /home/username/mysite/>
		Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
		AllowOverride All
		Order allow,deny
		allow from all
	</Directory>

	ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/mysite/error.log

	# Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
	# alert, emerg.
	LogLevel warn

	CustomLog /var/log/apache2/mysite/access.log combined

</VirtualHost>

Once you've saved these changes, you'll need to enable the site.

sudo a2ensite /etc/apache2/sites-available/mysite

Almost there. We've specified a separate directory for storing log files, so we'll need to create that.

sudo mkdir /var/log/apache2/mysite

Finally, we need to add the site to your hosts file. Edit /etc/hosts and add the following:

127.0.0.1    mysite.example.com

Now we restart Apache

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

You can now store all your work in /home/username/mysite and navigate to it by pointing your browser to http://mysite.example.com

[boon4376]

run the app as root "sudo" or open the saving directory as root and provide the permissions

Well its not really an app, its a PHP library for image processing, and I start nautilus with "sudo" before going in to apple permissions.

Thanks celaruan, I'll start working on that and see how it goes

[boon4376]

Once you've saved these changes, you'll need to enable the site.

sudo a2ensite /etc/apache2/sites-available/mysite

Im getting an error when I try to do this

Error: No site found matching /etc/apache2/sites-available/records!

I've tried creating the "records" file a few times from copying the default one... Is there an extension I'm supposed to be using? When I navigate to the folder I can see that the file exists.

[Celauran]

Navigate to /etc/apache2/sites-available and execute it there.

cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
sudo a2ensite records

Not sure why you can't call it with a path, but apparently you can't. Sorry.

[boon4376]

Navigate to /etc/apache2/sites-available and execute it there.

cd /etc/apache2/sites-available
sudo a2ensite records

Not sure why you can't call it with a path, but apparently you can't. Sorry.

ok that fixed that problem... I now have the virtual host working and can get to the images / files through the web browser, however I still cannot use imagemagick to write images to that directory and still get the error. (thanks for teaching me how to setup virtual hosts

[code]Fatal error: magickwriteimage(): C API cannot write the image at MagickWand index 0 to filename "logo.jpg" (reason: unable to open image `/var/records/logo.jpg': Permission denied @ blob.c/OpenBlob/2480) [on C source line 374] in /var/records/testrotate.php on line 11[code]



UPDATE: ok so changing the permissions on the folder is not working, If I make the owner of "records" www-data and hit "apply permissions to enclosed files" It doesnt actually apply the permissions to the images in there. For example, after hitting to apply to enclosed files, I opened an image inside the folder, and the image's owner has not changed.... If I manually changed that image's owner to www-data, the code executed flawlessly and the image was altered and saved over itself like its supposed to do....

So I have 80,000 images (These are archived records in the format of tiff images being stored on a local intranet server), I cant very well go through and apply permissions separately to each one for www-data, So how do I apply permissions to all of them at the same time?