[SOLVED] Piwik couldn't write to some directories (running as user 'nobody')

Hi,

I wanted to do my users a favor by replacing GoogleAnalytics with Piwik, but now I’ve hit a road block:

  • I have installed the Piwik files

  • I try to start the configuration process, by visiting the piwik.php page

  • I get:

    Piwik couldn’t write to some directories (running as user ‘nobody’).
    Try to Execute the following commands on your server, to allow Write access on these directories:

    chown -R www-data:www-data /home/<some_user>/releases/20140116095613/public/analytics
    chmod -R 0755 /home/<some_user>/releases/20140116095613/public/analytics/tmp/
    chmod -R 0755 /home/<some_user>/releases/20140116095613/public/analytics/tmp/assets/
    chmod -R 0755 /home/<some_user>/releases/20140116095613/public/analytics/tmp/cache/
    chmod -R 0755 /home/<some_user>/releases/20140116095613/public/analytics/tmp/logs/
    chmod -R 0755 /home/<some_user>/releases/20140116095613/public/analytics/tmp/tcpdf/
    chmod -R 0755 /home/<some_user>/releases/20140116095613/public/analytics/tmp/templates_c/

I’m using Nginx as a server and in the Nginx conf file, I explicitely set both User and Group to ‘www-data’. So:

	$ ps -elf | grep nginx

…gives:

1 S root 1274 1 0 80 0 - 12847 sigsus 14:52 ? 00:00:00 nginx: master process /opt/nginx/sbin/nginx
5 S www-data 1281 1274 0 80 0 - 13116 ep_pol 14:52 ? 00:00:00 nginx: worker process
5 S www-data 1282 1274 0 80 0 - 13116 ep_pol 14:52 ? 00:00:00 nginx: worker process
5 S www-data 1283 1274 0 80 0 - 13116 ep_pol 14:52 ? 00:00:00 nginx: worker process
5 S www-data 1284 1274 0 80 0 - 13116 ep_pol 14:52 ? 00:00:00 nginx: worker process
5 S www-data 1287 1274 0 80 0 - 12847 ep_pol 14:52 ? 00:00:00 nginx: cache manager process
5 S www-data 1288 1274 0 80 0 - 12847 ep_pol 14:52 ? 00:00:00 nginx: cache loader process
0 S root 2127 1987 0 80 0 - 2364 pipe_w 14:53 pts/2 00:00:00 grep --color=auto nginx

Checking the permissions for Piwik’s /tmp/ folder:

	$ ls -l /home/<some_user>/releases/20140116095613/public/analytics/tmp

…gives:

drwxrwxrwx 2 www-data www-data 4096 Jan 16 12:10 assets
drwxrwxrwx 2 www-data www-data 4096 Jan 16 12:10 cache
drwxrwxrwx 2 www-data www-data 4096 Jan 16 12:10 logs
drwxrwxrwx 2 www-data www-data 4096 Jan 16 12:10 tcpdf
drwxrwxrwx 2 www-data www-data 4096 Jan 16 12:10 templates_c

So, to me, www-data has clearly all permissions for /temp/ it needs.

So:

  • Why does Piwik say it’s run as user ‘nobody’: “Piwik couldn’t write to some directories (running as user ‘nobody’).”
  • Why does Piwik not let www-data write to these folders?

Thank you very much for any help with this!

EDIT :

Problem solved. A caching mechanism apparently didn’t let the new values (new user/group settings from Nginx) through.