Access Rights (Linux)

Linux stores for each individual file who owns it (owner and group) and what access rights the owner, the group and other users have. The owner can be changed by means of chown, the access rights are adjusted by means of chmod.

The web server and the PHP process often run with the rights of the user www-data in the group www-data. If your PHP process runs with a different user name, please replace all www-data below with the different user name.

You will probably transfer the files for SoSci Survey to the server via FTP or SFTP. The files are usually automatically assigned to the FTP user (in the example sftp). The files that are assigned to the user sftp according to the recommendations can also be assigned to the user root – it is only important that they are assigned to the correct group so that the web server and PHP processes have read access to the files.

To ensure that SoSci Survey works correctly, we recommend the following owners and access rights.

If you want to adjust owners and access rights for the installation directory according to the above recommendations, use the following commands. You may have to adapt the installation directory (in the example /var/www/htdocs).

Important: Check that your web server is acting as user www-data and adjust this user name if necessary before executing the above commands.

sudo chown www-data:www-data /var/www/htdocs
sudo chmod 770 /var/www/htdocs

If you are working as root (not recommended), you can omit the sudo.

cd /var/www/htdocs

If you now changed to the installation directory, you can adjust the file rights of the subdirectories with the following commands according to the recommendations.

Important: Check whether your web server acts as user www-data and adjust this user name if necessary before executing the above commands.

Important: Replace the user name sftp with the user who uploads the files to the server via FTP and updates them if necessary..

sudo chown -R sftp:www-data admin images inc lib layout modules plugins script templates
sudo chmod -R 750 admin images inc lib layout modules plugins script templates

The directories system, view and files are normally created automatically by SoSci Survey and provided with the correct access rights. With the following two commands, the access rights can still be corrected if necessary.

sudo chown -R www-data:sftp system
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data files view
sudo chmod -R 770 system files view

The directory system is intentionally released for the FTP user so that log files can be viewed via FTP.