File permissions in Sites folder

As the sites folder resides in a home directory then they follow the permissions set by the owner of that directory.

I dont use the Sites folder to serve webpages on my mac mini I have edited the apache config file to specify a directory in /Library/WebServer however I have just checked the sites folder in my home account and the permissions are 755.

When I copy files across my network over AFP to my sites folder on my server they use the same permissions that they were on set to on the mac I sent them from. For example

If I create a folder on my desktop by default it has 755 permissions. If I then zip the folder the resulting zip file by default has 644 permissions. When I copy the zip file to my sites folder it retains the 644 permission, then when I unzip it also retain the the 755 permissions of the original folder.


When I use FTP it follows the similar rules by default transmit uploads files with default permissions of 640 however when I unzip files the unzipped file retains the permissions that were set on it on the computer that sent it.

You can however in the transmit preferences setup what default permissions you want to use on any file that you transfer. You can specify different permissions on different file types. However this will not affect the contents of zipped files they retain the permissions set prior to them being zipped. Y

When you say "I dont use the Sites folder to serve webpages on my mac mini I have edited the apache config file to specify a directory in /Library/WebServer..." do you mean that you've set a specific directory within the webserver folder. for example a directory called "bob" would end up as DocumentRoot "/Library/WebServer/Documents/bob"?

No I have configured apache to use /Library/WebServer/bob as the root folder of my website. I don't use /Library/WebServer/Documents at all. I leave that for the apache manual.

Also, I'm still not sure how this relates to my problem with Joomla and the difference between writable directories on my ISP and my mac - would the reslut in the Library/Webserver/Documents/bob example be different (I suppose I should try it and find out!)

I have explained what happens for me, the folders just carry the same permissions that were set on the them prior to copying them. The other solution if you using transmit to transfer your files it to set ther permision defaults in the transmit preferences.