将httpd作为不同的用户运行？

Question

I am running httpd on aws ec2 instance on Amazon Linux 2.

For installing LAMP stack I used this link. The instance is running perfectly.

I need to execute a shell command from php using shell_exec('sh somescript'). The script then intern creates a folder using sudo mkdir foldername. This folder never gets created. So, I directly write shell_exec('sudo mkdir foldername'). Doesn't work.

I tried shell_exec('whoami'). This outputs apache(because of the group I had created from the installation.)

Other things I tried :

• Changing permission and ownership of the folder and subfolder of the directory. (Didn't work).
• Changing the user & group in httpd.conf.(Give Error 503, if I use ec2-user and doesn't start if I use root, which btw the comments asks.)

My question :

1. Why am I not able to create folder from php when httpd is running as apache user/group, when ec2-user is a user of the apache group?

2. Is it safe to use httpd with ec2-user as the user and group? If so how? If not what is the alternate?

Answer 1

I was able to resolve this on my own. For future reference, all I did was restart the instance and all the services.

I did not had to change the user or group for httpd. Although I'm still not sure if it is safe to do, but I was able to get around without it.