I’m trying to install a PHP-based software package in a Red Hat 7 Amazon EC2 instance (ami-8cff51fb) that has had Apache 2.4.6 and PHP 5.4.16 installed on it using yum. The installation fails because it says a particular directory needs to be writable by the webserver with 0755 or 0775 permissions.
The directory in question has 0775 permissions with root:apache ownership. I have verified that the httpd process is being run by the apache user and that the apache user is a member of the apache group.
If I edit /etc/passwd to temporarily give the apache user a login shell and then su to that account, I am able to manually create files as the apache user within the directory using the touch command.
I took a look at the source code of the installer script and identified that it’s failing because PHP’s is_writable() function is returning false for the directory in question. I created a separate test PHP script to isolate and verify the behaviour I’m seeing:
<?php
$dir = '/var/www/html/limesurvey/tmp';
if (is_writable($dir)) {
echo $dir, ' is writable';
} else {
echo $dir, ' is NOT writable';
}
?>
This outputs the NOT writable message. If I change $dir above to be /tmp then it correctly outputs that /tmp is writable.
If I change the directory permissions to 0777 and/or change the ownership to apache:apache then PHP still reports that the directory isn’t writable. I even tried creating a /test directory set up with the same permissions and ownership and my test script still reports it as not writable.
I’m really at a loss as to explain this behaviour, so any ideas would be welcome!
Thanks in advance.
The directory listing for /var/www/html/limesurvey is given below. The tmp and upload directories have 0775 permissions as per Lime Survey’s installation instructions. test.php is my test script mentioned above.
[ec2-user@ip-xx-x-x-xxx limesurvey]$ pwd /var/www/html/limesurvey [ec2-user@ip-xx-x-x-xxx limesurvey]$ ls -al total 80 drwxr-xr-x. 20 root apache 4096 Mar 30 11:25 . drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 23 Mar 25 14:41 .. drwxr-xr-x. 2 root apache 38 Mar 10 12:56 admin drwxr-xr-x. 16 root apache 4096 Mar 10 12:56 application drwxr-xr-x. 3 root apache 4096 Mar 10 12:56 docs drwxr-xr-x. 2 root apache 4096 Mar 10 12:56 fonts drwxr-xr-x. 19 root apache 4096 Mar 10 12:56 framework -rw-r--r--. 1 root apache 429 Mar 10 12:56 .gitattributes -rw-r--r--. 1 root apache 399 Mar 10 12:56 .gitignore -rw-r--r--. 1 root apache 296 Mar 10 12:56 .htaccess drwxr-xr-x. 4 root apache 4096 Mar 10 12:56 images -rw-r--r--. 1 root apache 6652 Mar 10 12:56 index.php drwxr-xr-x. 5 root apache 39 Mar 10 12:56 installer drwxr-xr-x. 89 root apache 4096 Mar 10 12:56 locale drwxrwxr-x. 2 root apache 39 Mar 25 14:41 logs drwxr-xr-x. 4 root apache 49 Mar 10 12:56 plugins -rw-r--r--. 1 root apache 61 Mar 10 12:56 README drwxr-xr-x. 4 root apache 4096 Mar 10 12:56 scripts -rw-r--r--. 1 root apache 380 Mar 10 12:56 .scrutinizer.yml drwxr-xr-x. 5 root apache 4096 Mar 10 12:56 styles drwxr-xr-x. 5 root apache 4096 Mar 10 12:56 styles-public drwxr-xr-x. 12 root apache 4096 Mar 10 12:56 templates -rw-r--r--. 1 root apache 159 Mar 30 11:11 test.php drwxr-xr-x. 3 root apache 20 Mar 10 12:56 themes drwxr-xr-x. 26 root apache 4096 Mar 10 12:56 third_party drwxrwxr-x. 5 root apache 80 Mar 26 13:45 tmp drwxrwxr-x. 6 root apache 79 Mar 10 12:57 upload
Running namei -l /var/www/html/limesurvey/tmp gives:
[ec2-user@ip-x-x-x-xxx ~]$ namei -l /var/www/html/limesurvey/tmp f: /var/www/html/limesurvey/tmp drwxr-xr-x root root / drwxr-xr-x root root var drwxr-xr-x root root www drwxr-xr-x root root html drwxr-xr-x root apache limesurvey drwxrwxr-x root apache tmp
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Answer
After much head-scratching, it transpired that SELinux was preventing the directory from being written to. I found a good tutorial that explains what’s going on. I was able to fix it by running this command:
sudo chcon -R -t httpd_sys_rw_content_t tmp