PHP ActiveX

Set a Remote File's Owner and Group

Demonstrates the Chilkat SFtp.SetOwnerAndGroup method, which sets the owner and group of a remote item. The arguments are the remote path (or handle), whether the first argument is a handle, and the new owner and group values.

Background: This is the SFTP equivalent of chown. Changing ownership is a privileged operation on Unix systems — ordinary users generally cannot give their files away — so expect it to fail unless the authenticated account has the necessary rights. It is most often used by administrative jobs that upload files which must then belong to a service account, such as a web server user.

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<?php

$success = 0;

//  Demonstrates the SFtp.SetOwnerAndGroup method, which sets the owner and group of a remote item.
//  The 1st argument is the remote path (or handle), the 2nd (isHandle) indicates which, and the
//  3rd and 4th are the new owner and group.

$sftp = new COM("Chilkat.SFtp");

//  Connect, authenticate, and initialize the SFTP subsystem.
$port = 22;
$success = $sftp->Connect('sftp.example.com',$port);
if ($success == 0) {
    print $sftp->LastErrorText . "\n";
    exit;
}

//  Normally you would not hard-code the password in source.  You should instead obtain it
//  from an interactive prompt, environment variable, or a secrets vault.
$password = 'mySshPassword';

$success = $sftp->AuthenticatePw('mySshLogin',$password);
if ($success == 0) {
    print $sftp->LastErrorText . "\n";
    exit;
}

$success = $sftp->InitializeSftp();
if ($success == 0) {
    print $sftp->LastErrorText . "\n";
    exit;
}

//  The 1st argument is a path, so isHandle is 0.  Changing ownership typically requires
//  elevated privileges on the server.
$isHandle = 0;
$success = $sftp->SetOwnerAndGroup('subdir/report.pdf',$isHandle,'www-data','www-data');
if ($success == 0) {
    print $sftp->LastErrorText . "\n";
    exit;
}

print 'Owner and group set.' . "\n";

$sftp->Disconnect();

?>