A messy “users” situation with SSH uploads, Apache and Tomcat processes

Question

I am in a messy situation that involves Apache and Tomcat 6. I serve PHP projects with Apache.

I use Tomcat to run Solr, a RESTful interface for search. I place the Solr index within the PHP application. This is helpful as all the code and data associated with a project is stored in a single directory. And it works without a hitch in our Windows development machines.

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But it gets tricky in my Linode Ubuntu VPS. I log in as root using SSH and all files I write in that session are owned by root. But then,

1. all PHP directories need to be readable and writable by www-data, which Apache runs as.
2. the Solr indexes need to readable and writable by tomcat6, which Tomcat runs as.

Hence, my flow to deploy a new project:

1. Log in as root with SSH and copy files to www
2. use chown to make the project owned by www-data
3. use chown to make the Solr index subdirectory owned by tomcat6

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The obvious way to make this straightforward is to create a new user xx, and run Apache and Tomcat as xx and upload to SSH as xx. What is a good solution so that I can simply upload the files so that both Apache and Tomcat can use it straightaway without any further settings?

Answer 1

Put www-data and tomcat6 in the same group and add your user (or root) to that group. sg and umask so files you copy get the correct group and are g+rw.