Permission Denied for Rails assets directory

Question

I've been searching for an answer online for awhile. I am running an app on Ubuntu/Apache/Passenger. I'm receiving a "permission denied" error to my assets folder. My file are located in the home directory. I run ls -l and it returns:

drwxrwxr-x 6 root root 4096 Aug 19 01:30 tmp

Answer 1

Well,

I moved my app to var/www then I ran the following:

chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www/appname

Answer 2

So the app is called events and this folder is owned by root ? If also events/config.ru is owned by root then passenger will not start the app as root but usually as nobody . Check out http://www.modrails.com/documentation/Users%20guide%20Apache.html#user_switching