Question

I have some web service + some shell scripts which I want to execute with cron.
The problem is with the tmp directory.

1. To make webservice work I had to run command sudo chown -R www-data:www-data app/tmp (www-data is group and user used by apache)
2. The problem is that then when I execute CakeShell with some user I get lots of errors telling that some files in app/tmp dir are not writable – this is because tmp dir is owned by www-data…
3. I can run those scripts with root user – then I don’t get any errors…
4. When I run scripts with root user, from time to time those scripts modify some files in app/tmp and then I got many errors on webservice (website) that some files in app/tmp are not writable. It seems that runing scripts sometimes modifies tmp files with permissions of user executing those scripts.
5. I want to execute those scripts from cron.

And my questions are:

1. What is correct setup for app/tmp dir (permissions, user, group etc) and how I can set it up to get both webservice and executing scripts from shell working?
2. Is it possible to set up permissions to app/tmp dir to allow writing and reading it for all users and groups? Is it good idea?

Answer 1

If you do not use a shared webserver, you can use a permissive ownership:

chmod -R 777 app/tmp

If you own the server/VPS, it’s not a security hole, since the more sensible user (www-data) already have access.

OR

You can run the crontab “in name of” www-data user, using the command su