Recently, I got a error ("permission denied: '/home/www-data' ") in django. Couldn't figure out the problem for a while...... but finally i got the solution.
1. What i was trying to do......
I have built a django application(that runs on apache server in production environment) that records all the user data, customer data and all the transactions. I was trying to add the feature that back-up the database to the location , "/home/binod/database-backup/xxxx-xx-xx", where binod is the username of the system and database-backup and xxxx-xx-xx (which is the current date) are the sub-folders inside "/home/binod/", are created dynamically by the system.
2. What happened............
Everything was fine in development environment. I was happy :) .
The code was:
@login_required
@user_passes_test(lambda u:u.is_superuser)
def backUpDatabase(request):
args = {}
now = datetime.datetime.now()
now_time = str(now.hour)+"-"+str(now.minute)+"-"+str(now.second)
today = now.date()
today = dateConverter.english_to_nepali(datetime.date.today())
today = str(today.year)+"-"+str(today.month)+"-"+str(today.day)
import getpass
user = str(getpass.getuser()) #this gets the current username i.e binod for my system [what i expected :( ]
backup_base_dir ="/home/"+user+"/database-backup/"
backup_sub_dir =backup_base_dir+today+"/"
backup_filename =backup_sub_dir+today+"-"+now_time+".sql"
import os
if not os.path.exists(backup_base_dir):
os.makedirs(backup_base_dir)
if not os.path.exists(backup_sub_dir):
os.makedirs(backup_sub_dir)
from projectUCN import settings
password =settings.DATABASES['default']['PASSWORD']
return_value = os.system("mysqldump -u root -p"+password+" projectUCN > "+backup_filename)
if return_value == 0:
from django.contrib import messages
messages.success(request, "database has been successfully saved to \""+backup_filename+"\"")
return HttpResponseRedirect('/admin/databaseOperation/')
I got exactly same output in development environment what i had expected but while running in production environment, I got the error permission denied: '/home/www-data'
3.What I did.........
The problem was with the line
import getpass
user = str(getpass.getuser()) #this gets the current username i.e binod for my system [what i expected :( ]
#But this gets the username 'www-data ' :D
backup_base_dir ="/home/"+user+"/database-backup/"
backup_sub_dir =backup_base_dir+today+"/"
backup_filename =backup_sub_dir+today+"-"+now_time+".sql"
so,
backup_base_dir becomes "/home/www-data/database-backup/" and so on.......
So, the solution is replace the user by the current username . i.e
backup_base_dir becomes "/home/username/database-backup/"
