Why doesn't www-data have shell/terminal access?

Question

I'm using Webinoly on Ubuntu 18.04 on a lightsail instance. I have www-data enabled and I can transfer files just fine using winscp. But why can't I use www-data in a terminal session? How can I enable terminal/shell access to www-data?

I end up using a different username to use shell (it's the same username that installed webinoly and also enabled www-data in webinoly).

I run into permissions issues with this setup. For example, I can't save files in nano in any of the htdocs directories. So I end up switching to root which is a dangerous crutch.

Composer also runs into permissions issues and I tried running it as root to get around the issues, and it gave me a big yellow warning not to run as root. So I bailed out since running as root is a bad habit.

Any good solutions for this? Alternatively how should I change permissions?

Comments

For now I am just using the chown command to get around the issue. 

Answer 1

Recommendations:

• Create a custom user for shell access with sudo privileges.
• Root login should be disabled.
• The www-data user is "jailed" to data folders (/var/www) and only for SFTP access, which is the preferred method to upload and modify your data files.

I don't feel comfortable giving so much access to www-data as you suggest. You should be very careful, it could result in a huge potential security hole.

Comments

Understood, and I think I found a suitable workaround