PHP File Permissions

Last modified: Tuesday, March 11, 2008

GCom Internet provides PHP processing over all hosting servers in a secure environment appropriate for shared, public hosting. Accordingly, it is imperative that the file permissions set on your PHP files and containing folders are within reasonable and safe limits. Exceeding those limits will result in our servers refusing to process your PHP files.

If you find your PHP files are not being processed, and you are confident that the files themselves were uploaded correctly in ASCII text file format, then the first thing to check is the permissions you have assigned to your files and containing folder.

Folder Permissions

The correct permission for folders containing PHP files is 755. This provides full read, write and execute access to the owner, with only read and execute permission for all other users. This is often expressed as rwxr-xr-x

Our servers currently refuse to process PHP files residing in any folder which has its permission set to any value other other than 755.

File Permissions

The correct permission for PHP files is 644. This provides full read and write access to the owner, with only read permission for all other users. This is often expressed as rw-r--r--

Although the correct permission for PHP files is 644, our servers currently also allow a permission as high as 755 to be set on PHP files before processing is refused. However, 755 permissions are allowed primarily for reasons of backward compatibility only. The correct and recommended permission for PHP files is 644.