hello there,
i am hosting a few websites for some friends.
i have one site that i want to give access to my friend to access to make changes, etc... but i only want him to have access to the directory that his page will be served from. I would like him to access it by ssh.
can i create a user account with a home directory of /var/www/his_web_directory ? So that he can ssh into his home directory and change things with his website. Would doing this create a security risk ? Next, who owns his files, or i mean if they belong to him, will user www be loading them from the internet? or will he have to chmod them or chown them somehow ?
thanks

I don't know about security risks, but you could certainly create a user with a home directory of /var/www/whateverdirectory . If the user already exists, you can use the usermod command, something like

Just pay attention to your permissions, and know to what group this user belongs. You can have /var/www itself be readable/writeable only by root, and just change the user and group permissions on each directory within this hierarchy. Apache should be able to access all of that just fine, but you could change the group to "apache" if the default arrangement doesn't work.

cool thanks much
i think thats what i will do.
the user does not exist yet.
but will in about an hour