Correct way to work with Joomla / Turnkey Lamp box?

[peteb66]

I've worked with Joomla before with shared host providers, never had a problem...well, you know what I mean..install went fine

I picked up the latest Turnkey linux (ubuntu) LAMP build in order to do my work locally and now I'm having all these problems with loading Joomla, or it loads but can't do anything, extensions don't do things they're supposed to, etc. I went through an install and gave everything '777' permissions (folders/files), i know...bad idea...but then i find my Akeeba Admin Tools extension can't 'fix' the permissions back to 755/644.....that author says to enable the joomla 'ftp' services as a backup...well, i can't get joomla to login via sftp on port 22...works fine with filezilla...there's not much to get wrong here. Tried adding ftp, but every app defaults to disallowing root logins, and then i get into that cycle of troubleshooting..

I think all of this is permissions related...apache is running under www-webuser or something, and i'm sftp'ing into the box as root, uploading my zips, unpacking them and running the joomla install with the browser.

Am I missing something here? Should I be creating/logging in with a new ID to copy my joomla install, or using this apache userID, or is root like i'm doing now fine? I seem to be spending all my time fighting the tools and not the code work Something I want to learn how to work out though...

Any help is appreciated! Thanks
Pete

[wwhite]

Yes, you should create a user and log in as that user, copy and unzip the files. You create problems foryourself when you use root
If you can use fastcgi it will solve some of your problems as well

[heiden98]

If I understand the OP's question correctly the underlying Turnkey/OS runs sftp on port 22 (so filezilla is ok), but using global administration functions from inside joomla, e.g. installing a module/extension, seem to require "unsafe" ftp on port 21/20, which is probably not installed by default. Any backend action that needs ftp will fail. I am currently running into that trap with the latest Turnkey/Joomla virtual machine.

Yes, I can access the joomla files using filezilla via sftp as a regular user, and I can ssh into the OS. But that alone doesn't solve the above problem. Question to the Turnkey crowd: should I install port 21 ftp or is it a configuration issue? To Joomla: is there a (much preferred!) way to configure joomla to use sftp instead of port 21 ftp?

Thanks, -gh

PS (edit):
I just found in another posting that the default filetransfer is done by http. The ftp option (which *is* obsolete and unsafe, and should be changed to port 22) is only shown if ftp is activated at all. I deactivated it and the error messages went away.

So, from my position, the problem is solved.