Local Users and Permissions

On the VMs, we created an OS user and group called quarkcat to control the necessary functions behind the website. The Apache and Tomcat directories, for example, are owned by quarkcat:quarkcat instead of the typical Ubuntu users www-data and tomcat.

You may or may not wish to create a quarkcat user in your local environment and copy this arrangement. If you do, having things like Tomcat and Apache owned by a user other than you or the standard users may limit your ability to use this software for anything else, and in fact it isn't necessary to have a quarkcat in a local development environment.

Access to Tomcat

If you don't use a quarkcat, you'll need to adjust some permissions. While deploying, data is written to the Tomcat data directory, meaning that whoever executes the deploy-from-svn script must have write permissions there (in particular, to the tomcat/webapps/ directory).

On Fedora 23, my solution was to create a new group containing both my primary user and tomcat, giving group ownership of tomcat/webapps/ to that group, and enabling write permissions for the group. This lets tomcat retain ownership and group ownership of its own folders, while allowing me to write to webapps/ when I execute deploy-from-svn as myself.

Script execution

If you received files as an archive (.tar, say), the archiving process can sometimes mess with file ownership and permissions. Make sure that the scripts deploy-from-svn and internal-deploy-from-svn are executable by the owner (the owner will be either you or quarkcat, depending on how you want to set it up).

-- Main.JoelG - 2016-07-19

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