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I created a directory /var/www to store my web apps clone in. When I initially cloned the app from GitHub it required me to use sudo and every time I do a git pull it's requiring sudo. I'm running into some problems because of this. For example, my ssh keys are not matching up. So when I do my git pull, I'm having to use HTTPS instead of ssh and manually enter my username and password every time I want to pull and update my app. How do I configure this so I don't have to use sudo every time I use git?

Ziyaddin Sadygly
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Scott
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3 Answers3

16

A couple of things are going on here:

  • When you sudo git checkout ..., all those files are owned by the root user and root group. With the standard permissions, that's why subsequent alterations to those files require you be root.

  • /var/www/ by default is owned by www-data group. Something your user is not by default.

The easiest way to write in /var/www/ is to just add your user to the www-data group. You can of course, change the directory to be owned by your user but this can have some nasty knock-on effects if you're not pre-empting them.

You'll need to re-log in after adding your user to the www-data group.

In your case specifically, you're going to need to fix your current mess of root-owned data. You can either delete it as root (and re-checkout) but if you have unsaved work, it'll just be cleaner to pull everything back to your user. The following example is extremely lazy and assumes what we're talking about is the only thing in /var/www/:

sudo chown -R www-data: /var/www/
Community
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Oli
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Hm, change folder owner? I moved my www folder in /home/username, you can change it's location in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default

michel
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I'm a bit late with this answer, but I found that to avoid entering password each time I had to change the repo from https to ssh.

From Github.com help section:

The git remote set-url command changes an existing remote repository URL.

Open Terminal.

Change the current working directory to your local project.

List your existing remotes in order to get the name of the remote you want to change.

git remote -v
origin  https://github.com/USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git (fetch)
origin  https://github.com/USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git (push)

Change your remote's URL from HTTPS to SSH with the git remote set-url command.

git remote set-url origin git@github.com:USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git

Verify that the remote URL has changed.

git remote -v

# Verify new remote URL

origin  git@github.com:USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git (fetch)
origin  git@github.com:USERNAME/REPOSITORY.git (push)
I'm Root James
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