I am writing web pages using PHP and would like to "require" code that I have written (in the future I would also like to be able to run python code).
whoami gives: www-data
require '/fullpath/code.php';
The error I get is:
require(/fullpath/code.php): failed to open stream: Permission denied
So the user www-data doesn't have permission to run my code. How do I give it permission? Also, how do I do this without opening up the can of worms giving hackers access to my web programs?
I have sudo privileges but I've never heard of the user www-data I do sudo find . | grep www-data (from the "/" directory) and I get nothing. So I'm not even sure where to find this "user" to change its permissions.
Thanks
www-data is one of the users that web servers run as. You don't need to change its permissions for it to access your code - you need to change your code's.
The easiest way to do that is to make your code world-readable - something like:
chmod -R 644 /fullpath
will do it.
chmod changes permissions; -R makes it run recursively; 644 sets the permissions to readable for Group and World (and you get Read, Write privileges); and the final parameter is the path to run this on.
You'll need to check that you don't have anything in that directory that you need Execute permission for, as the code as written will remove that permission and you'll need to add it back in.