For the record I am running OS X 10.4.7 on a powerbook G4. I have just installed Drupal 4.7 in my Sites Directory in my user folder (localhost). I am running apache 1.3 (I think), PHP 5.1.2 and mysql 4.1.14.

I am a newbie to Drupal and have just installed my first site. In doing so I followed the directions in the lullabot videocast on setting up Drupal. (By the way, the guys at lullabot are fantastic with all of the educational materials that they are putting out. Kudos to them!)

Everything went beautifully until I went to check my settings, only to find that the "files" directory was not created automatically. The videocast suggested that I should create the "files" directory manually which I did, within the finder. When I came back to the drupal admin>settings page it acknowledged
the addition of the "files" directory, however it gave me an error which read " The directory files is not writable ", which I assume happened
because I did not create the directory in the command line console (?). In any case, here I am stuck, not knowing how to address this problem. The videocast suggested that I should give the server write permissions , but gives no indications as to how to do so... Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!!!

Since I am a designer (I can hear the groans now...)and not a programer, I am only vagely familiar with the command lines of the terminal interface, however I am really good at following explicit instructions.

Regards,

David Brix

Comments

yelvington’s picture

In OS X, you change permissions on any item by highlighting it in Finder, hitting cmd-i (for info), and opening the detail widget at the bottom.

From a shell, you can use the chmod and chown commands. "man " is your friend.

For security's sake, you really want the files directory to be owned by the process that runs the webserver. I think that's "nobody" in OS X. Set perms so that only the owner can read/write. You need administrative access to do all of this, of course.

David Brix’s picture

Thanks for your suggestions. I had to set all permissions to read and write after setting the owner to "Nobody". While I think that this is O.K. since I am running the site on my dev. computer. Is this the right thing to do once I upload the site to a live server?

Thanks again..