Write Privileges - localhost - Mac OSX

Question

I'm new to the mac world and have just been setting up my webserver. I used the following guide: https://alan.ivey.dev/posts/2011/os-x-10.7-lion-development-native-mamp-with-mysql-installer/

I've transferred my sites and databases and everything is going pretty well. The only problem I have is with the writing permissions. For example there is a config file that needs to be written to, and I had to right click, go to Get Info then enable read & write for staff and everyone.

I can't manually go through and enable these write privileges for every file/folder. I didn't need to do this using WAMP and made development much quicker.

So wondering about 2 possible solutions: a) add my user account to a whitelist for the localhost so that 644 privileges are sufficient b) set the write privileges recursively

Answer 1

I found the best solution was to change the apache user and group settings. The instructions can be found at: http://paulmason.name/item/change-apache-user-group-in-lion-os-x

1. Open Terminal and Enter

   sudo nano /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf
   

2. Find and change http.conf code from

   User _www
   Group _www
   

   To

   User your_mac_username
   Group staff
   

   Note: With earlier versions such as Leopard, capitalize staff to Staff. You can get your username and group by typing "id" and hitting enter in terminal

3. Restart Apache

   sudo apachectl restart