I just installed Symfony CMF (standard edition 1.1) on a Linux VPS running Ubuntu 13. Everything is installed without errors but I always end up with a permission problem regarding the /app/cache & /app/logs folder.
As far as I know I installed the CMF as user root and the frontend is using user www-data, The only way to get it working without problems is by using these commands;
sudo chown -R :www-data app
sudo chmod g+s app
sudo setfacl -dR -m g::rwX app
chmod -R 777 app
After that it works perfectly but I am sure that from a security point of view this is not the correct way to do this.
So, I hope that anyone who has experienced this problem can provide me with a secure and correct method of solving the /app/ permission problem.
If I need to provide more information or show some configurations, I will gladly provide it as I need to solve this minor issue that is blocking the launch of my project.
This is explained in detail in the symfony documentation. Note that for images, we use the Imagine bundle, so you also need to set permissions on web/media/cache.
Usually you do not want to do things like deployments or git checkout as root, but with a non-privileged user. It is a good idea to have the webserver run under a different user, so that it can not just edit PHP files, to limit the potential damage in case there is a security issue in the webserver or your application.