How to make a NON-WRITABLE directory?

Question

Actually i'm aware of a "PHP Web Folder". There seems to be some potentials of incoming attacks. So that i want to make sure this whole directory is READ-ONLY (Only writable by ROOT).

Let's say the directory: /var/www/html/mywebsite/ (recursively)

Since it is a Web folder, there are users like "apache" and other respective users who owns the files/directories. So regardless of whatever user(s) are inside:

• How do i make that directory only writable by root only? (Not even by Apache)

Thank you!

Answer 1

Not sure what you mean by "a directory and its users inside".

The root user can always write to any file, so to make a file or directory writable only to root you make it non-writable by user, group, and others.

Note that the webroot dir is supposed to be writable by the apache user, so what you're trying to do is to give it the incorrect permissions. Anyway, the command would be:

chmod -R ugo-w /var/www/html/mywebsite/
chown -R root /var/www/html/mywebsite/

(this also changes the ownership of the files so the owner does not reactivate writing permissions; thanks to @Fiximan for the suggestion).

This is how you do this. Now, it looks like you have a XY Problem. If you tell us why you want to do this, perhaps we'll be able to suggest a better solution.