SuPHP Permission Issue

suPHP enhances overall server security. When migrating from a server that is not running suphp to a server running these, permission and ownership issues occur . When you access your domain you usually see

Tail the Apache error logs to see what the error is

# tail -f /usr/local/apache/logs/error_logs
You can see the error

[Thu Jul 12 09:00:09 2007] [error] [client XXX.XXX.X.X] SoftException in Application.cpp:601: Directory “/home/user/public_html/test.php” is writable by group .
[Thu Jul 12 09:00:11 2007] [error] [client XXX.XXX.X.X] Premature end of script headers:

The script fail if the php file or folder is writable for anyone other that the owner. Check the permission and ownership.

# cd /home/user/public_html/
# ll | grep test.php
-rwxrwxrwx 1 nobody nobody 158 2008-05-13 04:32 test.php

That shows test.php has full permission and is not owned by the user . Change the permission and ownership.

# chmod 644 test.php
# chown user.user test.php

If it is a server wide issue , then its difficult to change it for each user . Here is a script (for cpanel servers) that fixes all the files and folder permissions that occurs when server changes to suphp.

Please use the below script to change the user and group permission for cPanel servers,

1) vi fix.sh

#!/bin/bash for user in `ls /var/cpanel/users`; do chown ${user}:${user} /home/${user}/public_html chmod 755 /home/${user}/public_html find /home/${user}/public_html -group nobody -print0 | xargs -0 chgrp ${user} find /home/${user}/public_html -type f -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 644 find /home/${user}/public_html -type d -print0 | xargs -0 chmod 755 done

2) chmod u+x fix.sh

3) sh fix.sh

Some time .htaccess may have some php_value which also create internal server error. This can be fixed by

find /home/*/public_html -name “.htaccess” | xargs grep “php_value” | grep -v “#”