File Management Issue: Allow Users To Edit Certain Files But Hide The Rest.

[ranga227]

Hello all, I've been working on a project and ran into a little snag. I was hoping some of the gurus here could help me out.

I developed a highly customized ordering system and am offering it to clients. I want to give them full control to design the look of their own website without giving them full FTP or File Manager access to the entire directory. They only need access to edit 3 files and one directory. index.php, stylesheet.css, contact.php, and the images directory. With access to these elements, they can change the look of their entire site.

The problem I ran into is that all of the files are located in different directories. I installed eXtplorer, which is a great application and works fine, but the accounts I create grant them permissions at the directory level, therefore they have full access to all of the other files housed in that directory. I do not want them to have full access as I've paid a lot of money to create the customizations and they would be able to download them and cancel their subscription with me.

I am looking to have one central login page where they can access the three (3) different files, edit them (online preferrably), and upload or save them. They should not be able to see, modify, edit, or delete any other file in the directory.

I am running PHP5 and MySql 5 on a Linux based machine utilizing Apache.

Any help or a lead into the right direction would be greatly appreciated. If you have more information and would like to PM me, please feel free to do just that. Thanks in advance!

[Logan]

I think you need to rework your logic. A simple solution would be to create a new directory when they sign up. That directory would have their pages then created within it. Then set the permissions for that directory and those pages only for their access as appropriate. I've built similar functionality as you described and that was our approach.

[Sporkman]

I agree with Logan, that's the standard way to manage multiple users' files on a shared linux system.

Here are a few relevant linux commands you can google for details (which you may need to run as root, depending on the permission of the directory you're operating in):

To create a directory:

mkdir <directory name>

To change ownership of a directory & all its contents to a user:

chown <user name> -R <directory name>

To change permissions of a file or directory - in this example, you restrict permissions of a directory to the user who owns the directory:

chmod og-rwx <directory name>