As an extreme newbie, I am having difficulty managing ownership and permissions on my first box. What I can't figure out is how to deploy using one user, we will call him deploy and operate my php application with www-data user.

Currently as it stands, I know my server runs as www-data through this function <?php echo(exec("whoami")); ?> but I am having to chown between deploy and www-data every time I deploy. There has got to be an easier way to deploy with one user and still run as www-data.

EDIT: Here is the output from ls- l on the folder in question. You will see user deploy and group www-pub, the group is from an attempt to add the two different users to a new group and chown one of them in the hopes that they both would have the permissions (newb alert)

drwxrwxr-x 4 deploy www-pub 4096 Mar  7 01:41 example.com

I am using capistrano for deployment under the user deploy then once its done i chown to www-data, otherwise I can't use php to manipulate files. I am also unsure how to even change which user apache is running.