php - Permission denied mkdir for cron and browser

Question

We have an PHP XML parsing script that uploads photos to a folder structure like /content/images/2012/05/31/%object_id%/. This parser runs primarily as a DirectAdmin cronjob. We run into many problems getting the folder permissions right to enable the uploading in that directory for both the cronjob as running the parser via the browser.

According to print_r(posix_getpwuid(fileowner($directory))); the owner of the directory is is the same as get_current_user(). Nevertheless I receive: Warning: mkdir() [function.mkdir]: Permission denied when running the script via the browser. It works fine when running it as a cron job.

All folders have chmod 0777 and new folders are created as such;

mkdir($path,0777,true);

Naturally we have the same permission problems with uploading and/or deleting the files themselves.

Is there any way to enable all the file actions running both as a cron job and through the browser?

We are running Linux with PHP Version 5.2.17.

Answer 1

Couple of thinks to note: get_current_user gets the owner of the .php file (i.e. the script) but NOT the name of the user that is running the php script. Invariably these are different as the file will be uploaded by you (a regular user) and php/apache will run as a different user (often called "apache" or "www".) You need the latter of these two. suggested snippet from the php manual to get this is:

$processUser = posix_getpwuid(posix_geteuid());
print $processUser['name'];

(http://php.net/manual/en/function.get-current-user.php - see comments)

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To solve you current problem, though, my strong suggestion is to run the cron as the same user that the php/apache is running as (check man page on crontab) - the user should be the one in that snippet above, CHOWN the files and directories to that same user (they will currently be root) and to a group that is shared between you and the FTP client. Then make sure the user and group have read+write permissions so you can also edit from ftp. Make sure you change permissions on both directores (775) and files (644) as your script creates them.

Also note that if you mkdir(), then the directory above must also have write permissions for the user (and this might actually be your initial problem, and why only root/cron can write there).