magento install and chmod 777

Question

Ok so in install of magento in the knowlege-base says to changes permissions to 777. is that right that doesn't sound right to me at all in fact it sounds very insecure what should I do

Answer 1

pretty popular requirement, especially when running php as an apache module as, php will run as the same user as webserver (normally nobody or the like). So without chmoding the dir world readable/writable, then the apache daemon cannot write into it. It can be a security issue especially on a shared hosts/servers. There are was of making php run a specific user, but that would probably be best talked about on serverfault.com.

Answer 2

It depends on what you need to do with the Magento install. If you want to use the Magento Connect Manager built into the administrator interface then you will need 777 permissions. If you don't want this (such as if you're happy to use the command line PEAR installer) then only the var/, media/ and app/etc/ directories need to be 777.