External Storage Local permissions (user/group) todo.txt

ℹ️ Support
1

Nextcloud version: 13.0.4
Operating system and version: Ubuntu 16.04.5 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.4.0-131-generic x86_64)
Apache or nginx version: Apache/2.4.18
PHP version: 7.0.30-0ubuntu0.16.04.1

The issue you are facing:

Everything is running fine with this one odd problem.

I have set up an External Storage to a local directory for a user pat to house my todo.txt files. I was hoping to be able to access and modify this todo.txt file from other machines that are synced. However, something is not happy.

The local folder /home/pat/todo/ has these permissions:

drwxrwsr-x  3 pat www-data 4.0K Aug  1 10:24 todo/

Where www-data is the apache user. Both www-data and pat are in the group www-data.

The directory listing and file permissions are as follows:

-rw-r--r-- 1 pat www-data  162 Aug  1 10:23 todo.txt

Notice the group does not have +w on the todo.txt file.

If I add g+w on the todo.txt file, I can write to the file locally, and the changes are synced to my clients. Everything looks peachy!

-rw-rw-r-- 1 pat www-data  162 Aug  1 10:23 todo.txt

The Problem
The problem comes when I edit the same file on a client. If I modify todo.txt on a client, the file will sync. So far so good. But the permissions have now changed (on the server):

-rw-r--r-- 1 www-data www-data  238 Aug  1 10:39 todo.txt

This is not good.

How can I fix this, and why does www-data re-claim ownership of the file (and change the perms to remove group writing)?

My workflow/desire is to:

  1. have this local folder be accessible by the user pat on the server
  2. share this folder as a local external storage where clients can access (r/w) the files
  3. and have the sync back to the server work. (for continued access by user pat there)
2

So in the docs it lists that you want to set owner+group to www-data?!

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/localdir
sudo chmod -R 0750 /path/to/localdir

https://docs.nextcloud.com/server/12/admin_manual/configuration_files/external_storage/local.html

Doesn’t this sort of make accessing a local folder as “external storage” moot? The owner, group, and permission get hijacked by nextcloud, making the file access locally a little… hard. :frowning: