How can I give myself permission to edit files in /var/www without having to use the root account or sudo? [duplicate]
To give only your user permission to /var/www. You want to change the group owner to your primary group. If your username is joe this is how you would do it.
sudo chgrp joe /var/www
You then need to chmod the directory so its writable by the group joe.
sudo chmod 775 /var/www
after that you can write to /var/www
If you want to be able to edit and delete existing files. You need to take ownership of them.
sudo chown -R joe /var/www/*