# File permissions in railsapp for non-root mongrel **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [January 3, 2008, 8:04pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/file-permissions-in-railsapp-for-non-root-mongrel/124923 "2008-01-03T20:04:25Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![msojka](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/m/b5a626/32.png) [@msojka](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/msojka)\ **Post date:** [January 3, 2008, 8:04pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/file-permissions-in-railsapp-for-non-root-mongrel/124923/1 "2008-01-03T20:04:25Z")
Hello, Short version: what files and dirs need to be owned by the user mongrel is running as, for my rails app to work? I’ve set up a mongrel cluster to serve my rails app. At first, I loaded up the mongrels using launchd (it’s running on a mac), and the example plist-file I found for /Library/LaunchDaemons didn’t set UserName, so the mongrels ran as root. Everything worked fine, but I felt that they should run as \_www or some other non-privileged user. At first, I couldn’t start the cluster, but that was because \_www couldn’t write to tmp/pids/, so I chown:ed that dir. Now the cluster started up, but I couldn’t modify the database (I could read it though). This was a test app still on sqlite3, so I figured I’d better chown the db/_sqlite3 files as well. That didn’t fix the problem though (is sqlite3 creating some sort of lock file or something?). I realized \_www needs to write to log/_ also, and in order to fix the sqlite3-problem I resorted to chown -R the entire rails app. It works fine now, but I feel like I defeated some of the purpose of running mongrel as a non-privileged user. It now has write privileges on stuff it should never modify. Ideally, I’d like to give \_www privileges to only the files and dirs it needs to modify. Can someone here give me a few pointers? log/ tmp/ db/\*sqlite3 what else? - Martin