Correct chown and chmod for /platformdata, /boxdata, and /appdata After Changing Default Data Directory

[rnphil]

Hi everyone,

We recently changed the Default Data Directory in Cloudron, but it ended up causing permission issues, so we had to revert the changes and manually adjust the permissions. Since then, some services, including PostgreSQL, are no longer working correctly.

For example, PostgreSQL fails to start with the following error:

Feb 19 13:42:15 ==> Detected existing installation
Feb 19 13:42:15 ==> Copying updated config
Feb 19 13:42:15 ==> Updating existing postgresql
Feb 19 13:42:15 pg_ctl: could not access directory "/var/lib/postgresql/14/main": Permission denied

We suspect that some file ownership or permissions might still be incorrect, especially in the following directories:

/platformdata
/boxdata
/appsdata

Could someone confirm the correct chown and chmod settings for these directories to ensure Cloudron operates properly?

Thanks in advance!

[girish]

As a default, everything is owned by yellowtent user.

However, subdirectories inside those paths are mounted into app and service containers. Each container has it's own user space and will change the ownership of the files as needed.

For example, platformdata/postgresql will be used by the postgres container . All the start scripts of containers, will change the ownership of the data. For example, the postgres container already does chown -R postgres.postgres on start up.

Feb 19 13:42:15 pg_ctl: could not access directory "/var/lib/postgresql/14/main": Permission denied

Haven't seen this one before. Can you check the permissions of /home/yellowtent/platformdata/postgresql ?

[girish]

This is how my directory looks. I think in your case there is some issue with chmod and not chown related.

root@my:/home/yellowtent/platformdata# ls -ln postgresql/
total 4
drwxr-xr-x 3 808 808 4096 Jan  3 17:42 14
root@my:/home/yellowtent/platformdata# ls -ln postgresql/14
total 4
drwx------ 20 106 109 4096 Feb  5 13:55 main
root@my:/home/yellowtent/platformdata# ls -ln postgresql/14/main
total 104
-rw------- 1 106 109    3 Jan  3 17:42 PG_VERSION
drwx------ 6 106 109 4096 Feb 18 09:00 base
-rw-r--r-- 1 106 109  691 Jan  3 17:42 custom.conf
drwx------ 2 106 109 4096 Feb 17 11:39 global
drwx------ 2 106 109 4096 Jan  3 17:42 pg_commit_ts
drwx------ 2 106 109 4096 Jan  3 17:42 pg_dynshmem
-rw------- 1 106 109  811 Feb  5 13:55 pg_hba.conf
-rw------- 1 106 109 1636 Jan  3 17:42 pg_ident.conf
drwx------ 4 106 109 4096 Feb 18 09:05 pg_logical
drwx------ 4 106 109 4096 Jan  3 17:42 pg_multixact
drwx------ 2 106 109 4096 Jan  3 17:42 pg_notify
drwx------ 2 106 109 4096 Jan  3 17:42 pg_replslot
drwx------ 2 106 109 4096 Jan  3 17:42 pg_serial
drwx------ 2 106 109 4096 Jan  3 17:42 pg_snapshots
drwx------ 2 106 109 4096 Feb  5 13:55 pg_stat
drwx------ 2 106 109 4096 Feb 19 15:20 pg_stat_tmp
drwx------ 2 106 109 4096 Feb 16 22:01 pg_subtrans
drwx------ 2 106 109 4096 Jan  3 17:42 pg_tblspc
drwx------ 2 106 109 4096 Jan  3 17:42 pg_twophase
drwx------ 4 106 109 4096 Jan  3 17:42 pg_vectors
drwx------ 3 106 109 4096 Feb 17 11:06 pg_wal
drwx------ 2 106 109 4096 Jan  3 17:42 pg_xact
-rw------- 1 106 109   88 Jan  3 17:42 postgresql.auto.conf
-rw------- 1 106 109  968 Feb  5 13:55 postgresql.conf
-rw------- 1 106 109   96 Feb  5 13:55 postmaster.opts
-rw------- 1 106 109   98 Feb  5 13:55 postmaster.pid

[rnphil]

@girish

After applying this 4 commands, It is working properly again, all systems are 🟢.

chown -R 106:109 /home/yellowtent/platformdata/postgresql/14/main
chmod -R 700 /home/yellowtent/platformdata/postgresql/14/main

chown 808:808 /home/yellowtent/platformdata/postgresql/14
chmod 755 /home/yellowtent/platformdata/postgresql/14

Hope that these permissions don't bother us again in the future, and will soon try again to change the Default Data Directory.

Thank you very much for your directory output and help.

[girish]

@rnphil did you get a chance to see the permissions before you ran the commands? wonder what went wrong.

[rnphil]

@girish

When we initially changed the default data directory and restarted the entire Cloudron server, something went wrong. As a hotfix, we applied some basic permissions, which probably broke PostgreSQL. However, we don’t know which permissions were wrong, as I didn’t log them at the time.

This morning, we tried changing the default data directory again, but instead of restarting the whole Cloudron, we restarted all services individually, and this time we didn’t get any errors.