Joomla! Documentation™

restrictive permissions

N.B. chown is not needed with xampp

If you want a more restrictive approach, do this instead:

 # chown -R root:root /var/www/joomla
 # cd /var/www/joomla
 # PLACES='
 # administrator/backups
 # administrator/components
 # administrator/modules
 # administrator/templates
 # cache
 # components
 # images
 # images/banners
 # images/stories
 # language
 # mambots
 # mambots/content
 # mambots/editors
 # mambots/editors-xtd
 # mambots/search
 # media
 # modules
 # templates
 # '
 # for i in $PLACES; do chown -R www-data:www-data $i; done

Content

Well, chown -R is recursive .. thus images covers images/banners and images/stories. Same goes for mambots. Thus the subdirectories will have their ownership changed anyway.

Form

The chown program does handle more than one command line argument, and has done so since the dawn of time (i.e. the 70s).

Therfore you may write

chown -R www-data:www-data administrator/backups administrator/components administrator/modules administrator/templates cache components images language mambots media modules templates

Or if you want neat 80 columns

chown -R www-data:www-data administrator/backups administrator/components \
administrator/modules administrator/templates cache components images \
language mambots media modules templates

BTW: Leaving out the # marks makes it way easier to cut'n paste the commands into your favorite terminal window.

Update for Joomla 1.5.21

1. There is a tmp and a administrator/cache directory that need to be chown'ed as well. The first is needed if you enable compression. (Or so it looks from the Site setup pages) The later is needed by the "Joomla! Security Newsfeed" that is shown (or rather hidden) on the Backends start page.

2. The mambots directory is called plugins now. How can something basic as this this be changed in a point release??? Argl. Stuff like this should be changed in a major release or at least a minor, but a point release?