Are these wp-content permissions safe?

I have just started out with a VPS running centos 6.3 to host my blog and play around. After Installing WordPress 3.5.1, when I tried to install some plugins from the admin console, it complained of the folders in wp-content (upgrades, plugins, themes ..) not being writable. I changed the owner and group of these folders to ‘apache’ which didn’t work and then made the ftp user the owner which worked.

After this, I installed the BackWpup plugin which required the wp-content itself to be writable by ‘apache’ (owning by ftp user account did’t work).

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In the end I have folder permissions like below

[krishnaraj@myhost]$ pwd
/var/www/html/krishnaraj.mydomain.com/wp-content
[krishnaraj@myhost]$ ls -lrt
total 28
-rw-r--r-- 1 root   root                28 Feb  3 03:08 index.php
drwxr-xr-x 2 apache apache            4096 Feb  3 03:11 cache
drwxr-xr-x 4 apache apache            4096 Feb  3 06:52 uploads
drwxrwxr-x 5 myftpuser myftpuser      4096 Feb  3 07:22 themes
drwxrwxr-x 7 myftpuser myftpuser      4096 Feb  3 09:14 plugins
drwxrwxr-x 2 myftpuser myftpuser      4096 Feb  3 09:14 upgrade
drwxr-xr-x 2 apache apache            4096 Feb  3 09:32 backwpup-98372-logs
[krishnaraj@myhost wp-content]$

[krishnaraj@myhost]$ pwd           
/var/www/html/krishnaraj.mydomain.com
[krishnaraj@myhost]$ ls -lrt | grep wp-content 
drwxr-xr-x 8 apache apache  4096 Feb  3 09:32 wp-content
[krishnaraj@myhost]$

Are these permissions safe ? or should I be worrying about a security hole ?

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1 comment

  1. As per the following from http://codex.wordpress.org/Hardening_WordPress#File_Permissions

    /wp-content/

    User-supplied content: intended to be completely writable by all users (owner/user, group, and public).

    Within /wp-content/ you will find:

    /wp-content/themes/

    Theme files. If you want to use the built-in theme editor, all files need to be group writable. If you do not want to use the built-in theme editor, all files can be writable only by your user account.

    /wp-content/plugins/

    Plugin files: all files should be writable only by your user account.

    my permissions should be perfectly fine.