Question

I’ve set up Symfony2 on the AWS Linux AMI (a free tier micro instance) and set up PHP-FPM and nginx successfully.

My Symfony app works.. until I use the command line to clear the cache. When I do this the /app/logs and app/cache/ folder becomes owned by root and the app can no longer write to it.

I can manually chmod 777 / chown nginx:nginx these files after each cache clear, but there must be a better way?

I’ve tried using a bash function to su nginx; before it clears the cache, but that doesn’t work.

Before cache folder before cache clear:

drwxrwxrwx 11 nginx nginx 4096 Nov  4 13:23 dev
drwxrwxrwx 10 nginx nginx 4096 Nov  4 20:39 prod

And after:

drwxrwxrwx 11 nginx nginx 4096 Nov  4 13:23 dev
drwxr-xr-x 10 root  root  4096 Nov  4 20:39 prod

Is this something I can fix in the app, or is there a way of setting up the permissions so they don’t become rooted?

Edit: I should also mention I tried:

sudo chmod +a "nginx allow delete,write,append,file_inherit,directory_inherit" app/cache app/logs

But the server doesn’t recognise +a.

Also tried using:

 setfacl -R -m u:nginx:rwx app/cache app/logs

Which doesn’t error, but doesn’t fix the issue.

Answer 1

Edit:
Can’t accept this answer yet but this worked for me:
So I successfully enabled ACL on my mount following the guide here: http://blog.dsyph3r.com/2011/09/symfony2-using-setfacl-for-cache-and.html

For newbies like, me note the label of the drive is (somewhat strangely) "Label=/" in fstab.

Once that was done I used

 setfacl -R -m u:nginx:rwx app/cache app/logs
 setfacl -dR -m u:nginx:rwx app/cache app/logs

Now I can clear cache at will it seems.

Original (only use if you cannot or will not enabled ACL):
I followed a help page which got me to set umask(0000); in numerous places, namely the app/app*.phps and the app/console script. This seems to have worked, but I’m not sure of the implications.

Leaving question open for non-umask solutions. Looking into activating ACL on my mount, but new to that and it all seems.. strangely named.