Change Apache’s Default User www-data or Home Directory /var/www/

I was getting errors from StarCluster run due to not being able to find .starcluster directory in /var/www/.

This directory has config file and log directories for StarCluster so without it, it can’t run.

To solve the issue, I set up my own user in Apache envvars instead of www-data which also changes default home directory to mine.

Edit following file with super user permissions:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/envvars

Enter your username to following lines and save:

export APACHE_RUN_USER=user
export APACHE_RUN_GROUP=user

Restart the server:

sudo service apache2 restart

• apache2
• default user
• default home directory