Who should own /var/www? [closed]

Posted by John on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by John
Published on 2012-07-10T19:34:25Z Indexed on 2012/07/10 21:18 UTC
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Filed under:

linux

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apache2

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security

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lamp

Possible Duplicate:
How should I structure my users/groups/permissions for a web server?

I've seen a few answers to this on the internet, but I'm looking for a definitive answer. I have a new Ubuntu 12.04 LTS server with LAMP. Apache is set to run as "www-data" and /var/www is set as having "root" as the owner and "root" as the group. The permissions for /var/www are "drwxr-xr-x" which I believe translates to 755 numerically.

I know that /var/www should not be owned by "www-data" because then buggy/malicious code could have a field day. However, should I keep it as root:root (inconvenient) or should I change it to ubuntu:ubuntu, the default user that Ubuntu preconfigures for you to log in with? Should the permissions remain at 755?

I've been administrating systems for a while with no big security issues, but I'm trying to get really serious about security, double-check everything, and make sure that there are no gaps in my knowledge.

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