Prevent git from overwriting file owner upon git pull

I've seen a handful of similar questions on here, but none of the solutions given seem to be working... wondering if they're outdated, or this case is somehow different...so I wanted to open up a new thread to talk about it.

I've run into a frustrating problem where, every time I perform and git pull, it changes the owner to the pull-er's user. What happens then is that the site shows the following error:

Warning: file_get_contents(/var/www/html/wp-content/themes/<my-theme>/resources/views/<changed-file>): failed to open stream: Permission denied in /var/www/html/wp-includes/class-wp-theme.php on line 1207

which can only be fixed by running chown www-data on the changed file.

This will become an issue when more people begin to work on the site, or when important files are change (default template/header/footer..), and the site goes blank until chown is run.

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Site details

Laravel, wordpress, ubuntu 18, armor hosting

Git repo stored in custom theme

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I've tried a few solutions, but none seem to work, (perhaps because they're implemented incorrectly..)

Solutions I've tried

1: set filemode to false - I set filemode to false, locally and globally, on my local machine and the server in question. I've tried changing the case to "fileMode" too.

2: implement post-update hook - I added a post update hook to automatically update the file permissions/ownership. Here's the script (note that the git repo is in the custom theme):

#!/bin/sh

# default owner user
OWNER="www-data:www-data"

# changed file permission
PERMISSION="664"

# web repository directory
REPO_DIR="/var/www/html/wp-content/themes/quorum-theme"

# remote repository 
REMOTE_REPO="origin"

# public branch of the remote repository
REMOTE_REPO_BRANCH="master"

cd $REPO_DIR || exit
unset GIT_DIR
files="$(git diff-tree -r --name-only --no-commit-id HEAD@{1} HEAD)"
git merge FETCH_HEAD

for file in $files
do
  sudo chown $OWNER $file
  sudo chmod $PERMISSION $file
done

exec git-update-server-info

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Let me know if there is anything else worth trying, or if you notice an issue with my code...

All the best,

Jill

You are pretty close to the correct solution.

You need to enable the following hooks:

• post-merge, called after a successful git pull
• post-checkout, called after a successful git checkout

If you are sure to only use git pull, the post-merge hook is enough.
Enabling both hooks guarantee you the hook is always called at not extra cost.

The content of the hook should be like:

#!/bin/sh

# default owner user
OWNER="www-data:www-data"

# web repository directory
REPO_DIR="/var/www/html/wp-content/themes/quorum-theme"

echo
echo "---"
echo "--- Resetting ownership to ${OWNER} on ${REPO_DIR}"

sudo chown -R $OWNER $REPO_DIR

echo "--- Done"
echo "---"

The script will reset the ownership to OWNER of all files and directory inside REPO_DIR.
I have copied the values from your post, eventually change it to your needs.

To enable the hook you should:

• create a file named post-merge with the script above
• move it inside the directory .git/hook/ of your repo
• give it the executable permission with chmod +x post-merge

Repeat eventually these steps for the post-checkout hook, that needs to be equal to the post-merge hook.

Pay attention to perform a sudo git pull if your user is not root. All the files and directories in the target directory are owned by www-data, you need to perform the git pull command with a superuser privilege or the command will fail.