Permission of 775 not enough

Question

I have my theme files at permission of 775, but still the theme editor in the admin says there's no permission. only when i change the permission to 777 it lets me edit. Why is that?

Thank you.

Answer 1

The "user" running your webserver (sometimes _www, sometimes www-data, sometimes "nobody") lacks the permissions to edit these files. You can either change them to be owned by that user or change them to 777. To find out what your web server user is, assuming you're running apache, run ps aux | grep httpd in the command line and in the leftmost column, see what user it's showing!

Cheers~

Answer 2

You need to chown the parent directory, recursively with -R flag

chown -R www-data:www-data /directory

and maybe the permissions as well:

chmod -R 774 /directory

Just make sure the FTP user is member of group www-data and it should work like that.