Git add permission denied ubuntu

Question

My application is hosted on ubuntu in public_html folder. When I run the command git add . it gives me the error:

warning: could not open directory 'public_html/': Permission denied

Entire code is in public_html folder

How can I solve it?

Answer 1

You should make sure so that your user has access or is the owner of the folder and it content. You can check the current owner and permissions by running:

ls -l public_html

Here I list all non-hidden files in a test folder:

who:test who$ ls -l 
total 0
-rwxrwxrwx  1 root  admin  0 Oct  3 18:04 test1
-rwxrwxrwx  1 root  admin  0 Oct  3 18:04 test2

The output shows that both files are owned by the root user and belongs to a group named admin. The first column also shows the access permission, which in this case is set to read and write access to everyone.

If you would like to change the owner you can do:

sudo chown -R <user>:<group> public_html

The above will set the owner of the folder and all its content to the specified user and group; you might need sudo privileges to do this.

There is possible to only change the owner or group with the same command:

sudo chown -R <user> public_html
sudo chown -R :<group> public_html

To change the permission you would use:

sudo chmod -R <mode> public_html

Where mode is the permission, for instance 0777 for full read and write access to everyone. You can also use letters instead of an octal number when setting permissions, for instance:

sudo chmod -R a+rwx public_html

gives the same result as the first chmod command.

References

• The chown command: https://ss64.com/bash/chown.html
• The chmod command: https://ss64.com/bash/chmod.html