Question

I’m taking a pictures with a webcam via flash and posting the data to the server to manipulate later.

Just switched from shared hosting to a Amazon’s EC2 instance(server).

I get this error:

Warning: file_put_contents(uploads/20120615104908.jpg): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /var/www/html/addons/webcam/capture.php on line 4 ERROR: Failed to write data to 20120615104908.jpg, check permissions

This is the code that’s failing.
When I change the chmod of uploads/ to 0777 it works but I’m afraid that’s unsafe to do.

(I apologize for the poorly writtenness I only recently got time because of this bug to revisit this code, I promise you I will form it better 😀 )

$filename = date('YmdHis') . '.jpg';
$imageData = file_get_contents('php://input');
$result = file_put_contents( 'uploads/' . $filename, $imageData );

if (!$result) {
    print "ERROR: Failed to write data to $filename, check permissions\n";
    exit();
}

$url = $filename;
$_SESSION['imageName'] = $filename;
print "$url\n";

Answer 1

Yes, it’s really unsafe.
You need to check the owner of uploads/. It must be the same user that runs you PHP scripts (wwwdata or apache or something like this).

$ ls -ld upload
$ # oh shi...
$ chown wwwdata upload
$ chmod 640 upload

That’s all!