I run a lot of WordPress installations. Imagine that. Since I work on multiple computers in the house and I would hate transferring files via FTP every twenty seconds, I edit all files directly on the server via Finder or Explorer — the www/ directory is a shared folder. Unfortunately, for many moons, this presented a problem. Either I could write to the directory and the server (meaning PHP/Apache) or I couldn’t write and the server could.
I tried the age old permissions modifier. I know, I know, this is insecure. Right? 777 is the Devil’s 666 of the UNIX-permission world. The only reason I feel this is permissibile is that this is a local server and never, ever, touches the public Internet (oh, and it makes it work).
sudo chmod -R 777 ./*
Now alone, that would not do anything different, but in conjunction with:
sudo chown -R www-data:ryan ./*
It will work. (Maybe.) It works for now and tentatively.
Maybe there is another way. If there is, let me know.