Permissions

Depending on your hosting environment, permissions may or may not be an issue you need to concern yourself with. The important thing to understand is that there is a potential for issue if the user you use to edit your files on the file-system is different from the user that PHP runs under (usually the webserver), or at the very least, the two users don’t have Read/Write access to these files.

Being a file-based CMS, Kunena needs to write to the file-system in order to create cache and log files. There are three main scenarios:

1. PHP/Webserver runs with the same user that edits the files. (Preferred)

   This is the usual approach used by most shared hosting setups and also this approach works great for local development also. The blog post we wrote regarding OS X Yosemite, Apache, and PHP outlines how to configure Apache to run as your personal user account. This approach is not considered secure enough to use on a dedicated web host, so the second or third option should be used.

2. PHP/Webserver runs with different accounts but same Group

   By using a shared Group between your user and PHP/Webserver account with 775 and 664 permissions you ensure that even though you have two different accounts, both will have Read/Write access to the files. You should also probably set a umask 0002 on the root so that new files are created with the proper permissions.

3. Different accounts, fix permissions manually

   The last approach is to have completely different accounts and just update the ownership and permissions of the files after editing to ensure that the PHP/Webserver user can Read/Write appropriately.

A simple permissions-fixing shell script can be used to do this:

                    #!/bin/sh
chown joeblow:staff .
chown -R joeblow:staff *
find . -type f | xargs chmod 664
find . -type d | xargs chmod 775
find . -type d | xargs chmod +s
umask 0002

You can use this file and edit as needed for the appropriate user and group that works for your setup. What this script basically does, is:

1. Changes the user and group of the current directory to joeblow and staff
2. Changes all files and subfolder to joeblow and staff ownership
3. Finds all the files from the current directory down and sets the permissions to 664 so they are RW for User & Group and R for Others.
4. Finds all the folders from the current directory down and sets the permissions to 775 so they are RWX for User & Group and RX for Others.
5. Sets the ownership of all directories to ensure that User and Group changes are maintained
6. Sets the umask so that all new files are created with the correct 664 and 775 permissions.