** Using WeBWorK **

I constantly run into issues about ownership and permissions; this could be due to a number of things (root copying the files, or the history of the file, etc).

You might possibly review the permissions section of the documentation; kind of like a doctor telling you to get lots of rest - how can it hurt.

The command line/ terminal is the best/only (?) way to do this; you can use the GUI to check your results.

Part of the documentation file follows...

Setting Permissions

The PG installation directory and files should be owned by wwadmin and not writable by other users:

$ cd /opt/webwork/pg $ chmod -R u+rwX,go+rX . 

Most WeBWorK directories and files should also be owned by wwadmin and not writable by other users:

$ cd /opt/webwork/webwork2 $ chmod -R u+rwX,go+rX . 

Certain data directories need to be writable by the web server. These are DATA, courses, htdocs/tmp, logs, and tmp. It is convenient to give WeBWorK administrators access to these directories as well, so they can perform administrative tasks such as removing temporary files, creating and editing courses from the command line, managing logs, and so on. We will create a new group called wwdata, containing both the WeBWorK administrators and the web server. Run the commands

$ sudo addgroup wwdata <wwadmin password> $ sudo adduser wwadmin wwdata 

If there are other users who will also be administering WeBWorK files, now is a good time to add them. To do this

1. Open Dash Home, type User and open User Accounts
2. Click the "Unlock" icon and enter the <wwadmin password>
3. Click the "+" icon and create the new account
4. And remember to add the new account to the wwdata group as above.

Now add the Apache2 webserver (which runs as www-data) to the wwdata group:

$ sudo adduser www-data wwdata 

You can check that this succeeded in a terminal window by entering

$ id wwadmin 

and then you should see wwdata listed under groups. Also

$ id www-data 

should show wwdata listed under groups. Now we make the WeBWorK directories that need to be writable by the web server have wwdata as their group. The following are rather long commands; you might want to copy them and paste them into your terminal window rather than typing them.

$ su Password: <root password> # cd /opt/webwork/webwork2/ # chgrp -R wwdata DATA ../courses htdocs/tmp logs tmp # chmod -R g+w DATA ../courses htdocs/tmp logs tmp # find DATA/ ../courses/ htdocs/tmp logs/ tmp/ -type d -a -exec chmod g+s {} \; # exit $