User Group Permissions

Use this as a general reference to setting up user groups for your various app / processes on your Raspberry Pi.

If you find errors, please submit a pull request / issue so we can solve this. Permissions are tightly coupled with security and we want great security!

Below I’ll be using the following:

• Group www-data
• User pi

Create group

sudo groupadd www-data

Add user to group

sudo usermod -a -G www-data pi

Remove user from group sudo gpasswd -d pi www-data

View users in group

grep www-data /etc/group

Change folder ownership

sudo chgrp -R www-data /var/www/

Add (+) permssion to make files in folder readable (r), writable (w), and excutable (x) for the group

sudo chmod -R g+rwxs /var/www/

Now all users in the group www-data have read, write, and execute access to everything within /var/www/

Let’s check:

Review Folder Ownership

ls -al /var | grep www

Reboot & Test

sudo reboot

touch /var/www/deleteme
rm /var/www/deleteme

No permission errors? Nice.

Permission errors? Perhaps you need to run it again or run sudo reboot (if you didn’t)