Settings permissions on /var/www

Question

I'm running ubuntu server and have apache installed as a web server. I'm letting my web developers upload files through sftp (ssh) to /var/www. I'm using www-data group to control access to /var/www folder. They are able to upload the files successfully but when they try to access that file in a browser, they get a 403 forbidden error.

How do I make sure that when the files are uploaded, the permissions are set right?

Answer 1

From a terminal, type

sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/

If that still doesn't work, try

sudo chown www-data /var/www

Failing this, post the output of ls -l /var so we can rule out file permissions.