Its not so much a concern here in my development sandbox, but as I think about how my script will be deployed, perhaps in shared hosting environments, I shudder to think of the security consequences.

Part of what I need this script to do is:

  • accept user input,
  • process input,
  • create and post a pdf in a web accessible directory
  • hand pdf off to hylafax for distribution

    This started out as a working cli script, and on the road to being web-available as a cgi script, I'm having to jump over these privilege issues. Surely someone here has done this sort of thing before.

    How can I safely allow a script running as the apache user to write to a web-accessible directory, without exposing that directory to tampering in a shared-hosting environment, where others can also write into the webserver's document root or deploy scripts that can?

    -- Hugh

    In reply to Allowing Apache to Write to filesystem by hesco

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