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Re: website permissions and ownership



On 2/2/2021 9:55 AM, Richard Hector wrote:
On 2/02/21 9:11 pm, Jeremy Ardley wrote:

On 2/2/21 3:09 pm, Richard Hector wrote:
Hi all,

I'm reviewing how I set up websites (mostly Wordpress at the moment),
and would like other opinions on what I'm planning is sane.

My plan is to have a user eg "mysite" that owns all/most of the
standard files and directories.

The webserver (actually php-fpm) would run as "mysite-run".

Group ownership of the files would then be mysite-run, but
group-write permission would not be granted except where required, eg
the 'uploads' and 'cache' directories.

Files in those directories, created by the php-fpm process, would
obviously be owned by mysite-run.

Alternatively the group ownership of most of the directories could
remain with mysite, and but the uploads and cache directories
group-owned (and group-writeable) by mysite-run.

The objective of course is that site code can't write to anything it
shouldn't. I know that means that I'll have to install upgrades,
plugins etc with the wp cli tool.

I earlier had thoughts of improving this with ACLs, but a) this got
really complicated and b) it didn't seem to solve some of the
problems I was trying to solve.

I wanted to be able to allow other users (those who might need to
update sites) to be able to log in as themselves and make changes,
but IIRC nothing (other than sudo or setuid tools) will allow them to
set the ownership back to 'mysite', which is what I want it to be.
I'm aware of bindfs, which allows fuse mounting of filesystems with
permission translation, but as far as I can tell, it doesn't allow
mapping of userids. Tools could help, but I'd rather some of these
users had SFTP access only, which would prevent them being used.

Any thoughts?
Am I mostly on the right track?

Thanks,
Richard


What you are doing sounds pretty O.K. Though I personally also use
SELinux for web facing services.

Thanks.

I haven't looked in to SELinux. I looked at AppArmor, but it appears
that it won't work as expected in an LXC container, which is where I run
this. Would SELinux work there? SELinux, from what I can see, seems more
complex to learn than AppArmor.

To accomodate other users I suggest you set up staging areas where
they can upload content that you periodically sync to the website
using a privileged process. This means you don't have to give any
rights to users other than access to the staging areas.

Yes. I can foresee difficulties with my clients not being able to see
their changes immediately.
Inotify could be of interest there by monitoring the staging area.


1)  https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man7/inotify.7.html

--
John Doe


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