Ubuntu www-data write and FTP write at the same time

Question

I'm running an Ubuntu 10 web server and have my websites in the /var/www/<user> folder. The owner and group of the files and folders was <user>. This was fine using FTP, however when WordPress tried to access the filesystem it couldn't (as in Apache couldn't). So I changed the permissions of the folder and files to have the Owner as <user> and the Group as www-data. I also added <user> to the group www-data.

However none of this has worked. If I make www-data the group & owner Wordpress can access the filesystem but FTP won't work. And vice versa if <user> is owner and group then FTP works but Apache can't access the filesystem.

How do I solve this?

Answer 1

Change the permissions to allow those outside the group to read and write:

chmod -Rv 0777 /var/www