How to change file permissions in localhost Windows 10 pro/docker/ddev container for Drupal site?

Question

I have installed a drupal 8.8 site using Composer on a Windows 10 pro system and docker and ddev as the development environment.

The drupal site seems to be functioning normally: I see no errors in the drupal log nor when I run ddev describe.

The only exception: Drupal gives me a warning that sites/default/settings.php needs to be write protected. In the past I have done this on a live site using Filezilla, but this is a development only site and it seems Filezilla does not apply permissions on local files--at least, when I right-click the file locally, I do not find a command for changing permissions.

I tried changing the write permissions with Windows 10 itself, but that did not seem to have any effect--I suspect for windows those are different kinds of permissions.

I poked around online and saw something that made me think I could use phpmyadmin to change permissions. Got caught up in that and struggled with it, until getting some help here (How to access phpmyadmin on DDEV Windows 10 pro localhost with SSL record too long error) but it turns out you can't change file permissions with phpmyadmin, apparently.

I tried to use the address that connected me to phpmyadmin in my browser to connect with Putty, but Putty tells me the host does not exist.

So the help I am looking for: how can I change file permissions for sites/default/settings.php in Windows 10 pro localhost running docker/ddev development environment for my drupal site?

Thank you!

Answer 1

I assume you're talking about this warning?

First, you can ignore this warning completely. You're on a local development environment, and so you shouldn't have any concerns about the permissions of settings.php.

Unfortunately, in a Windows environment, you can't make simple permissions changes as Drupal 8 is suggesting that you do.

Note that settings.ddev.php explicitly provides the skip_permissions_hardening option, $settings['skip_permissions_hardening'] = TRUE; to tell Drupal 8 not to try to change permissions on sites/default and sites/default/settings.php because it's just a dev environment and because when Drupal does these things it just makes things harder.

However, to make most things easier on Windows (doesn't solve that problem)...

Use nfs_mount_enabled

I see there are loads of problems with the new "official" Drupal 8.8.0 composer build on Windows. Most of them are due to the composer build making some assumptions about the ability to set time and ownership, but the docker mount used by default (CIFS) has everything owned by root, so the container can't change permissions (even thought they're wide open).

I found that I could get by all of these things by using NFS to mount into the container, and you'll also find it improves performance quite a lot. Set up for NFS by following the instructions at https://ddev.readthedocs.io/en/stable/users/performance/#windows-nfs-setup