How to correctly set writable the /var/www/ directory of an Ubuntu Linux system?

Question

I am a software developer so I am not so into operating system configuration details and I have the following problem.

I have installed a LAMP environment of an Ubuntu Linux system dedicated to the develop (it is on my PC and it is not a production server).

So I am trying to set the /var/www as the workspace of Aptana (the IDE that I use for PHP develop) but I can't do it because I have not the permission to write in this directory (I think that it is my logged user that have not this permission).

So I know that probably I can solve this issue simply changing this permission by:

sudo chmod -R 777 /var/www/

I think that it makes readable, writable and executable anything that it is into the /var/www/ directory, is it right? But for who? For every user that can be registered on my system or only for the logged user?

Reading online it seems to me that (maybe, I am absolutly not sure) I can obtain the same result (write into the /var/www/ directory) by doing something like:

sudo chown -R myUserName:www-data /var/www/
sudo chmod -R g+s /var/www/

Is these 2 commands true for my pourpose? What exactly does? I am trying to read the official documentation and it seems to me that works in this way:

1. First I set my user as the owner of the /var/www/ directory (so it means that it can write into this directory and in all subdirectories because use the -R parm?) and assigns the www-data group. But what is this www-data group? Is it a standard Linux group or is a new group that simply can group member?

2. I really have no idea about what exactly does the second statment. What it does?

What solution are better?

Answer 1

Basically the first command:

sudo chmod -R 777 /var/www/

Makes it readable, writable and executable by anyone (any user). You are on the right track with the latter commands, as you can set chown to www-data. www-data is a default user/group for Apache.

Or you could create a new group and add yourself and www-data there, then assign the group to the folder permission with chown.

Also instead of using numeric chmod values, you can use chmod -R ugo+rwx folder which means that give user, group and others => read, write and execute rights to this folder. Similar way you can also remove rights chmod -R ugo-rwx folder.

Setting directory with g+s makes all new files created in said directory have their group set to the directory's group.