Question

My code gets a permission denied error at the move_uploaded_file() function when I’m trying to save a file into a folder on my server (from the temp folder).

My user has full permissions across all the website directories and files. Is there an apache user that need permissions as well? How do I give permissions to this apache user?

If that isn’t the case. Is there a way I can use the php chmod function to fix this problem?

Thanks for the help!

Answer 1

You are correct. The folder you need to move the file to doesn’t need you to have permissions, it needs for the web server to have permissions.

Basically you need to figure out what account your web server is running as and give that user write permissions to the destination directory.

To figure out what your web server account name is, try the following command (assuming you’re running Linux):

sudo lsof -i tcp:80

You should get back a bunch of lines with a USER column. One will be root, ignore that one. The other user listed is the user under which your web server is running. It’s probably something like www or www-data or apache or the like.

After that, navigate to the parent directory of your upload directory and change it’s ownership and permissions with the following command:

sudo chown www-data:www-data uploads
sudo chmod u+w uploads

At that point, your webserver user now has access to write to your uploads directory. If you have any trouble, post a comment and I’ll try to help out.