Re: Apache umask

[Stefan Fritsch <sf@sfritsch.de>]

Hi,

On Friday 22 February 2008, Martin Fuzzey wrote:
> To avoid permission problems it would seem I need to create a new
> group, add the www-data to it and set the apache umask to 002.
> I am thinking about doing this by modifying /etc/default/apache2
> from my posinst script.
> Is this allowed ? (this file is _not_ a conffile for apache)

No. You may not change other packages' config files without user 
interaction, even if they are not conffiles. 
Besides, /etc/default/apache2 is a conffile in newer versions of 
apache. And changing apache's umask to make everything group writable 
is not something that should be done automatically.

> If not are there any better ways to do it?

Change the umask in your application. In most (all?) scripting 
languages it is possible to do that for one request. Or use suexec or 
ACLs.

Cheers,
Stefan