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.

1. 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.
2. 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

Edit the httpd.conf File

If you are using Apache as your main web server, your httpd.conf or sites-available or sitename.conf file needs editing. However, your web directory needs to allow the .htaccess file to override its configuration. on debian based apache it is apache2.conf

Keep in mind, to edit this file you need to have access to the server.

Enable AllowOverride

Change your web directory override rule and enable it. Simply copy and paste the code below in the directory:

<Directory /var/www/>
        AllowOverride All
    </Directory>

Make sure the path in the code matches your server’s path.

Enable mod_rewrite module

To enable the mod_rewrite module, simply type the code below:

 sudo a2enmod rewrite

If you have enabled this module before, you will receive a warning. In this case, you will need to restart the server by using the following code:

sudo systemctl restart apache2