ownership of webapp directories

[turtles]

Greeting group
I have a few webservers set up with the ownership of webapp directories under "/var/www/localhost/htdocs" as root.
Over the years of doing development work I have had to do tricks to get my X applications to run as root when I do development and testing.

Now I am running into an issue with kdiff3 crashing if I run a git merge as root.

It has just occurred to me that there might not be any reason for the root ownership.

I can't think of any reason a perl / php / javascript / rails etc whatever web app would need to run as root? or have files protected by root ownership?
Sure the config files in /etc are root owned.

Any thoughts on this form the Gentoo security guru's?


Thanks in advance
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[eccerr0r]

there shouldn't be a reason that any web app needs to be accessed as root, just needs to be accessible by apache that has its own unprivileged user.

however what does the script need to ultimately do? Does that need root access...

Ideally the application should be owned something other than apache if possible, just so that if apache gets compromised, it doesn't have the rights to break into your script.

Do keep in mind whenever you switch users, you do need root access as switch user requires root access - so that may be part of the issue.
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[turtles]