My situation must be the first description you provided because I was unable to really do anything or finish installation until those few directories were created and set to 777.
In my case the couple of existing folders / directories were 757. By checking the write permissions of OTHERS and making the permissions 777, MODx was able to complete the setup.
Thanks for the information. Very helpful.
Quote from: sottwell at Jul 28, 2013, 07:23 PMWhat permissions are needed depend on how the server is configured. If the server invokes PHP as an Apache module, the .php file (in our case the index.php file) is run as the Apache user (usually "apache", "nobody" or "www"), not as your user. This means that the files and directories that you uploaded as your user can't be written to or deleted by the Apache user, so permissions have to be set to 777 for directories and 666 for files, which means that everybody can write to them (as in moving uploaded images into place, automatically editing configuration files or writing cache files). This also leads to cases where MODx has uploaded or automatically written files as the Apache user, so you can't edit or delete these files from your FTP client, since you aren't the file's owner, the Apache user is. This is common with Gallery type add-ons.
If some form of "suexec" is used, then the user is switched (Switch User EXECute) to exectute the PHP file to be the user of whoever owns the file (your FTP user). In this case, permissions of 755 for directories and 644 for files is used; only the owner can write, while all other users (such as the Apache user) can only read the files and directories. This is obviously much safer, and many hosting providers now use it and configure their servers to throw an error if 777 or 666 permissions are used. For several years I have checked hosting to make sure that it uses suexec of some kind.
