I have looked around a great deal on the Drupal forum and elsewhere but I cannot yet resolve this.
I have had to reinstall a large, fully functional site (Drupal 7.18) onto a new server. This has gone very smoothly. However, I do not seem to be able to set permissions for my sites/default/files directory in a manner that keeps it accessible and safe when browsing using the IMCE file browser.
- Usually I set sites/default/files (and subdirectories within it) as 755, with files within these directories as 664. This works well on many other Drupal 7 sites I have built.
- HOWEVER in this case, with these permissions I get the message "Unable to get a working directory for the file browser".
Only by setting directory permissions as 777 can I browse the files in these directories using IMCE - and I know that is really bad practice on shared hosting.
Please can someone advise on troubleshooting this? I have spent hours but I am getting nowhere.
I wonder if the ownership of the files and directories themselves is wrong. If they are wrong, can anyone direct me to step-by-step instructions for changing them?
- Examining the 'problem' files and directories using FireFTP, I see that both user and group names are the same as the FTP username that was given me by my web host.
- Looking at another Drupal site that works properly, I see that files and directories in sites/default/files are set to user 531/group 528.
Thanks in anticipation! I am running D7.18 on PHP 5.2.10 with extensions enabled. Everything else seems to be working very well indeed. However, I am not sure I have the Apache or Linux skills needed to resolve this, or even to ask my hosts the correct questions ...