/var/www/html/ permissions and users

[portia]

I've set up a home http server on my old laptop - Centos 5.2. I'm using joomla for content management. My question is what permission should I set for the files/folders in my joomla directory. I mean I read that for files 644 and directories 755 should by enough. Also, who should own all those files/directories - shall I keep them as owned as root or shall I create a separate user for administering the website/apache and chown them to the new user?
thanks in advance

[coopstah13]

644 is fine for files with static content (html) but script files such as php need to be executable as well, you should use 755 for those as well.

[deakons]

Also, who should own all those files/directories - shall I keep them as owned as root or shall I create a separate user for administering the website/apache and chown them to the new user?
thanks in advance

If you have multiple users on your machine you should change ownership to the user that handles website administration. If you are using Apache httpd you may already have a user created for this task.

egrep "^User|^Group" /pathto/httpd.conf

[portia]

Ok thanks guys. It was helpful