How do I set files and directories created as root to be read and executable as another user?

Question

I'm using Cloud9IDE's SSH workspaces, and for a variety of reasons, we are required to create that SSH tunnel as root. This is not really an issue, however the files and directories we are creating with it actually live under a user folder (in this case let's say the user is "foobar", so the files are being created in /home/foobar/public_html/dev).

The problem is that since the user "root" is actually creating the files, navigating to those files in the browser returns a 404, since the server uses the user "foobar" to serve pages.

I need a way to ensure that even though files have been created by the root user, the user foobar should be able to read and execute them as though that user created them.

I have tried using setfacl -Rdm with a group that includes root and foobar, and that wound up making it so foobar could no longer serve any files in it's directory.

For example:

-rw-r--r--  1 foobar  foobar    125 May 15 11:26 die.html
-rw-r--r--  1 root    root      127 May 15 12:20 dies.html

In this case, the file "die.html" is served properly, but "dies.html" results in a 404 due to the owner and group.

Any thoughts on how to resolve this? To reiterate: I would need this to happen for all future files, not simply files which presently exist.

Answer 1

Take your pick:

chown foobar:foobar *

chown foobar:foobar dies.html

chown foobar *

chown foobar dies.html

So, to have all files created owned by foobar, here's what you need to do:

run crontab -e and input this:

* * * * * while true; do chown foobar:foobar -R /home/foobar/public_html/dev/* & sleep 1; done

Save it, and let cron take over permissions

Answer 2

change your User Identity to foobar after establishing ssh tunnel by entering su foobar and enter password of foobar.

Answer 3

Create a new group, Say devs and put all users who needs read/write access to your files in that group. And then change the group of that directory to devs.

With this command:

chgrp -R devs /home/foobar/public_html/dev

After that set setgid bit in that directory with this command:

chmod -R g+s /home/foobar/public_html/dev

From this point all files created in that directory will be owned by group devs and all users in that group will have read/write access to the fies(Depends on permissions).

If you want to know what setgid is check this link.