I've set up Apache, but I can't write to the '/var/www' folder

I've set up Fedora 14 with Apache, MySQL and PHP for my own homepage on a "server" (read: old hardware scrapped together).

I'm logged in with my user, but I have no rights on /var/www/html.

How do I change this, so that I can save my files to this folder? Maybe change the permissions or redirect the folder to my home folder?

The www folder is created by most distributions during the apache setup process. As the setup process is run by root, the www folder is owned by root. Use ls -al in /var to look at it's permissions.

drwxr-xr-x  5 root root  4096 May  2 11:34 www

chmod and chown are GNU coreutils that you can use to modify the permissions of unix directories.

Use chown to change the owner and group of /var/www/html/ to your user and group, e.g.

sudo chown -R jason:jason /var/www/html/

As you're likely to start putting PHP scripts in here, you'll then need to use chmod to make sure the apache user (in most cases www-data) is allowed to execute them.

Try and understand how Unix permissions work before proceeding any further as it will save you some time down the line. Good luck.

As root, run chown yourusername /var/www/html. This will assign it to your user. Alternatively, you could set up Apache to use some directory inside your home directory as "DocumentRoot". (see /etc/apache, /etc/httpd or similar).

Most Apache installations are also set up to link your $HOME/public_html/ to http://server/~username.

Both approaches have some limitations in that you have to give far-reaching permissions to the files, so you can edit them and the webserver can read them (and if you use PHP, edit them in some cases, should this be necessary). For this reason, it might be better to copy files to /var/www/html and assign them to the web server user.