Folder and file permission issues on Mac OS X

Question

I've written a PHP script that takes the results of a MySQL query, json_encodes the results and finally does a file_put_contents() action. When running my Bitnami WAMP dev-server on my PC, the script executes perfectly. However, when clone my git project on my Mac (running Yosemite). I get permission denied upon trying to executing the file_put_contents() function. Here is my script:

<?php
// All Articles to JSON //
if( array_key_exists("makejson", $_REQUEST) ) {

// Class to Serialize The JSON
class ArrayValue implements JsonSerializable {
public function __construct(array $array) {
    $this->array = $array;
 }

 public function jsonSerialize() {
     return $this->array;
 }
}

// Designate the file
$file = "articles.json";

// FHA articles query
$milArticles = $dataConnection->SelectColsWhere( "text_news", "active='1' ORDER BY ndate DESC", "textnewsid,ndate,ntitle,sentence" );

if(count($milArticles) > 0){

  $json_data = json_encode( new ArrayValue($milArticles), JSON_HEX_APOS | JSON_PRETTY_PRINT );

  // Check for JSON errors
  if ($json_data === null && json_last_error() !== JSON_ERROR_NONE) {

   throw new \LogicException(sprintf("Failed to parse json string '%s', error: '%s'", $json_data , json_last_error_msg()));

    } else {

      file_put_contents($file, $json_data, LOCK_EX);


   }
 }
}// END OF MAKE JSON

This is the error I get:

[Mon Feb 09 16:06:20.522798 2015] [:error] [pid 686] [client 127.0.0.1:50195] PHP Warning:  file_put_contents(articles.json): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /Users/myuser/Sites/PIXEL/militaryinfo/restrict/includes/articleJson.php on line 33, referer: http://militaryinfo/restrict/submit_JSON.php

Here are the permissions in the directory I'm trying to write to:

drwxr-xr-x  15 myuser  staff   510 Feb  6 19:13 restrict

The solutions I've heard are running an unmask() in PHP and a chmod() but I haven't had luck with either. Even running chmod or chown in the Terminal doesn't seem to help.

Answer 1

Run echo exec('whoami'); in a PHP script and run the PHP script from browser. It gives you who is the owner of the server application.

Then chown that user and group both and provide appropriate permissions as you wish. Something like:

chown -R user:user /my/folder

user is discovered from the PHP script.