Symphony.

I have inherited several symphony sites that I am attempting to manage. I have a two-pronged issue: our hosting provider strongly urges a 755 directory/644 files permissions setting, but when I set them this way, the sites will eventually go white-screen on me, which I traced back to (I believe) the log file not being writable. From what I can tell, on our current host, I need to set the logs file and possible the cache file to 777. Otherwise when symphony tries to write the next log file it simply stops working and the site disappears until I re-open the permissions.

I'm sure there's an "ideal" solution for this that involves changing hosts or installing a new version of symphony, etc. - but realistically I just need to keep these sites running and as secure as possible.

So my question: is it possible to disable the log function altogether? I don't use them and manifest/logs seems to be the sticking point regarding permissions. It looks like I can do this through config.php, but I'd like some confirmation before I start messing with things.

Thanks -

Symphony advocates that all files and folders are 755 for permissions, so it may be that the PHP on your server isn't running under the right user/group account.

For example, my shared host runs my user account as johnporter yet PHP runs under www so I had to open up specific folders the way you described.

It's not ideal, no, but I/my host seem to live with it ok.

Thanks, I'm sure it's a hosting configuration issue, but I'm really wondering if I can just disable the logs altogether.

You could change this line to just return true

While it won't completely disable logs, it will prevent them from being written to disk. I don't agree with it though, as it makes it difficult to debug any potential issues.

What @designermonkey said is completely correct.

Thanks. These are extremely static sites, and we haven't had a reason to consult the logs - but we have had security issues that are leading me to want a tight permission set. In an ideal world I'd be on a different host altogether, but it's not worth the trouble for these particular sites.

Thanks for the help.