To be able to upload files through the sftp server and the website being able to use the files without constantly having to “chown” the files you can do 2 things.
- Change the www-data group to use your user as membership. however this option is not ideal because the file permissions need to be set to group aswell instead of just user.
- change the user which is used by apache from www-dat to your own username. This is a better solution, provided that your username and password combination is not a security risk in the first place
You do this by editing the httpd.conf file or when you are using a Debian based distro the apache2.conf file change the following from www-data to your username and groupname
export APACHE_RUN_USER=www-data
export APACHE_RUN_GROUP=www-data
for example
export APACHE_RUN_USER=thura
export APACHE_RUN_GROUP=thura
This only works if you do not use any other webservices on the same server. For example I use the webinterface for pihole on lighthttpd and this won’t update anylonger after using this method