Question

On my (shared) webhost, I’m using PHP’s curl and fopen to download and save a remote XML-file to a specific directory. The system has to read and execute it later.
Right now, I’ve created the directory beforehand (permissions: 777) and the system is able to write the XML-file in the directory.

I am afraid that giving permissions to anyone to read, write and execute is a security risk.
Therefore, my questions are:

1. Is setting chmod to 777 a security risk in this case?
2. Is there a way to achieve the desired results without setting chmod to 777?

(Since I am a beginner, I’m not (yet) familiar with file users, file groups and file permissions. Is there a way that only “the system” is able to read, execute and write?)

Answer 1

1. You should avoid 777 alltogether.
2. There is a way. Such problems are better solved via chown than chmod. One way is to make sure the user that writes the files (normally apache or www) belongs to the group of the folder owner then set permissions to maxiamlly 775.