Webserver cannot write to directory when installing CMS

Question

I have a local stand-alone LAMP stack that I'm using for local web development. I've tried to install multiple CMS's that all use PHP to write data to a MySQL database and files on the webserver (Concrete5, Symphony, GetSimple CMS).

However when I try to install any of these I get error messages that each state something along the lines of "the files I need to change are not writeable by the webserver."

Concrete5 error message:

error: Web Server Access to Files and Configuration Directories
The /config /packages and /files directories must be writable by your webserver

Symphony error message:

Missing log file

Symphony tried to create a log file and failed. Make sure the install folder is writable.

Obviously this is a permissions issue, however I've tried changing the owner & group (recursively of course) of apache's www directory to many different combinations of root, the apache user & group and my own user & group as well as set the permissions all the way to 777 using chmod, and still I get the same error from all systems.

I can drop a regular static file (like phpinfo) into the www directory and apache serves it up just fine, but no matter what I change the permissions to the CMS's cannot write to the server. What is going on?

Answer 1

If you use seLinux, it's not enough to give permissions using chmod. You have to grant apache permission to write into those folders as well.

More information can be found here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/SELinux/apache