Symphony.

Ok, so I’m getting a little fed up with permissions errors for all (yes, all) of my Symphony installs.

I can understand why the installer needs to have some permissions changed on install, which I am happy to do, however I always have trouble installing extensions, reading cache dirs tmp files etc.

I can never seem to get them right unless I set them to 777! Which means something I am doing is very wrong.

(BTW, I’m fed up and angry with myself for all this.)

In the config file it specifies 0775 for both files and folders. Which files and folders does this apply to, and why does it need specifying in the config file?

Can someone please list all the files and folders in a standard Symphony post-install and list the permissions that Symphony expects next to them.

My main issue is with extensions, especially JIT (as I have threaded about before) I can never get it to enable on a hosted site without setting htaccess to 777, which is totally weird. I’m having it with other extensions now…

Please please please help?

Sorry I don’t have that permission list handy, but I think I’ve run a site with everything set to 0755. The key issue though is usually who the owner and group actually are. Specifically, if you are on shared hosting, the owner and/or group for your direct file access(ie FTP) may not be the same as PHP’s (which runs as Apache’s user). This can cause headaches when you need to edit file both directly, and through Symphony, since Symphony may not have write access to the directories it tries to write to.

On my server, the owner is a ‘webserver’ user, and the group ‘www-data’, which Apache also belongs to. This lets me SFTP and edit Symphony files, and also gives Symphony write access.

The best solution I’ve found is to set all directories and files like this:

• Owner: www-data
• Group: mygroup (where I’m the only member of that group)
• Permissions: 775

But I still have to reset some file from time to time. Like when I create a new data source or page. I haven’t been able to instruct Symphony to follow the above convention. And during a new installation I have to go through the above resets two or three times.

Thanks for your advice guys.

As I’m on shared hosting I have the safe-mode to contend with, so as you said Andrew, I’m stuck with those headaches. I’ve installed locally to avoid this, then moved the files to the host (One of the things I love about Symphony, no hard coded urls), but now I have the permissions thing for other reasons…

Carson, I’m going to contact Support about user/group information and see what I can do from there… I’ll go with the 755, as that’s what I thought it should be, it does seem to be a user/group thing, now you mentioned it.

Thanks again

Sorry to hear that. It’s a very backward policy that you see with these shared hosts, because it usually results in users opening up to 777.

because it usually results in users opening up to 777

Which is exactly what I’ve had to do to get any extension that edits either htaccess or config.php.

Bummer. It’s not too bad though, I can change them back straight after.

When I start making some real money, I may go dedicated ;)