PHP access outside of /var/www

[pwds]

This is probably a stupid question but I work in general school IT and any web stuff I do in addition to the job description. Starting an OU degree in web applications but it'll be a couple of years before I get to server configuration.

 

Recently I've been experimenting with some open source video applications like KalturaCE and Red5 open source flash. To cut a long story short I have created a symlink for /var/www/kalturaCE/content/webcam to point to the Red5 streams directory at /usr/share/red5/webapps/oflaDemo/streams.

 

When recording from webcam from within Kaltura it seems to be able to record the file without any problem using Red5, but Kaltura then isn't able to play back the file.

 

Is this as PHP isn't able to read outside of /var/www and if so how can I give it access? For obvious security reasons I'd like to restrict it just to that path.

[SteveBentley]

Apache will run as a specified user, and by extension PHP uses that same user. You can find this from phpinfo() - often something like 'nobody'.

 

For PHP scripts to be able to read and write, that user has to have rights (using the standard Unix chmod and chgrp type permission change commands) to the files/directories concerned.

[jmcdermott]

Default user for most linux web servers is www-data.

so:

sudo chown www-data /usr/share/red5/webapps/oflaDemo/streams

 

sudo chmod u=rw,go= /usr/share/red5/webapps/oflaDemo/streams

or

sudo chmod a+rw /usr/share/red5/webapps/oflaDemo/streams

 

 

I think.

[SteveBentley]

Just need to make sure that the account you use for ftp can also access it, by putting it in an appropriate group.

[pwds]

Turns out this was a Red5 error as downloading the files using SFTP or playing them in OflaDemo also didn't work- obviously it's not fully recording the file.

 

I suspect this is due to server resources so I'll try it on something a bit more substantial and see how I get on.