We are building an example bash script for our PHP TestCoverage Tool use on Linux. The development environment is Ubuntu 12.04_1 but we intend to have the linux example work across as many linux versions as possible without modification.

The example linux script requires a variable be set to the PHP Document Root path and by default uses a small PHP example source to show the user how our GUI and text report shows the covered and uncovered PHP code areas. The linux script is also intended to be easily alterable by the user to automate the TestCoverage display of users PHP code.

The problem we are having with Ubuntu 12.04 (any linux?) is that the PHP Apache2 document root is defined in /etc/apache2/sites-available/default as /var/www and /var/www is defaulted with "drwxr-xr-x" read only access. So in order to add our own folder as /var/www/SDTestCoverage we must change /var/www to "drwxrwxrwx" read-write access.
So it seems our script (at least on Ubuntu) will need to ... 1. acquire and save the /var/www permissions then do .. 2. sudo chmod 777 /var/www (to make writable) 3. mkdir -p /var/www/SDTestCoverage (create our folder under the document root) 4. sudo chmod 777 /var/www/SDTestCoverage (make our subfolder writable) 5. and finally restore /var/www permissions

Thanks and our Questions are .. 1. Is this the standard way (using Ubuntu) one adds a writable folder under the PHP Document Root? 2. Is this the most general purpose way one adds a writable folder under the PHP Document Root on other versions of Linux?