[FIXED] Joomla extensions, file permissions

Issue

I am having a lot of trouble installing extensions in Joomla, after looking into it a bit, I realise that I think I need to change my files permissions, I have no idea how to do this. In Joomla, System Information, Directory Permissions, all my permissions are set to unwritable apart from "configuration.php". I have no idea how to change this on linux. I am running Joomla 1.7.3 and Ubunutu 11.10.Can anybody shine any lightn on how to change the permissions?

Solution

Your problem is very likely to be OWNERSHIP rather than PERMISSIONS per se.

The problem is that there are two main ways to run PHP on a web server. One runs PHP as part of Apache and has these problems. The difficulty is that you put the files in place as one user, but the Apache web server accesses the files as a different user. In your case Apache/PHP created the configuration.php file so it is the owner and can write to it. Other files were put in place by you so Apache/PHP can't touch them.

There are two possible solutions:

1) Change the ownership of the Joomla files (recursively) to the user that Apache/PHP operates as.

chown -R user:group *

Where 'user' and 'group' should be replaced with the actual username and groupname that Apache operates as. Make sure you are in the root folder of your webspace before running this command.

2) Install and configure PHP to run through CGI using fast-cgi and SUExec.

If you go with the first option - things will work - but you will experience difficulties if you want to edit any files manually, eg template and css files.

Option 2 is a lot of work for the inexperienced but does away with these permissions difficulties as PHP will access the files as you.

Answered By - Dean Marshall