Ubuntu Sever – How to set file owner for all files and folders

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Problem

If you find you can’t edit WordPress theme and plugin files from the wp-admin – it’s likely the file owner on the server is not set correctly.

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Solution

This often happens when the files have been created outside of WordPress, for example by copying over using FTP.

Step 1: Confirm the problem is the file owner

To confirm this problem, open the directory using your preferred FTP application – such as Filezilla – and look at the ‘Owner/Group’ column.

If you see ‘root root’ – the problem is file permissions. The web server will not be able to edit files owned by root.

Step 2: Determine the correct file owner

In my case, I can see the correct owner is ‘www-data’.

This will be used in step 4.

Step 3: Note the WordPress directory path

For example, ‘var/www’

This will be used in step 4.

Step 4: Update the file permissions using the server terminal

Log into the server terminal – I do this using the Putty application.

If you do not know how to do this, talk with your server host.

Run the following command, which recursively updates file owner permissions.

Note – you will need to replace the file owner and WordPress directory path for your server.

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www

How does this work?

This Ubuntu Server terminal command uses the sudo chown command to change the owner and group of the /var/www directory and all of its subdirectories.

Here is how the command works in more detail:

  1. The sudo command is used to run the following command with superuser (i.e., administrator) privileges. This is necessary because the /var/www directory and its subdirectories are owned by the system and cannot be modified by a regular user without superuser privileges.
  2. The chown command is used to change the owner and group of a file or directory. This command takes the following syntax:
  3. chown [options] [owner][:group] [file or directory]
  4. In this command, the -R option is used to specify that the owner and group will be changed recursively for the /var/www directory and all of its subdirectories.
  5. The www-data:www-data part of the command specifies the new owner and group for the /var/www directory and its subdirectories. In this case, the owner and group are both set to www-data, which is the user and group that are typically used for web server files and directories in Ubuntu.
  6. The /var/www part of the command specifies the path to the directory whose owner and group will be changed.