Sublime Text 3 authentication question when saving document

I am using Sublime Text for web developement. Every time I try to save changes (Ctrl+S), the authentication window pops up:

Authentication is needed to run '/bin/cp' as the super user

Obviously, when I enter the password, Sublime saves changes correctly. But when I press Cancel, another window pops up with an error:

Error: administrator_copy_file (/tmp/.Some_File_Here, /var/www/Rest_Of_Path_Here) failed: Authorization failed

As I am quite new to Ubuntu I don't know how to get rid of that authorization pop up. I have all permissions to /var/www folder.

Solution 1:

You don't have permission to write to /var/www/Rest_Of_Path_Here. ST3 is trying to elevate its UID to write as the correct user (hence the sudo prompt). I didn't know it could do this but I've tested it and it works so there you go.

There are a few ways you can fix this:

1. Allow your user to write the files directly. So many options here:

   • chown the files so you own them. This may upset things running as other users that might also need to write, eg a webserver running as www-user. You may need to change what they run as too.
   • Add your user to the www-data group and change the file mask to 774 so members of the group can write/execute.
   • Change the file mask so other users can write (eg 777)... But this is pretty risky if there's something malicious on the server already.
   • Use ACLs to allow your user to write without disturbing the standard permissions framework.

2. Change your workflow to write into a version control system (eg git) as your users, and then have a script running as the other user check it out. This carries other benefits.

3. Run ST3 as a user who can write there:

   sudo -u www-data subl /var/www/Rest_Of_Path_Here
   

   This is quite a lot uglier than just fixing the files.

Solution 2:

I had the same issue and was able to solve it by providing user right to the particular folder which I had to edit in Sublime text 3. I used the following commands:

sudo chmod 775 -R projectname/   
sudo chown username -R projectname/

I think it might be helpful to others in future.