[SOLVED] mkdir: cannot create directory ‘X’: Permission denied

Issue

I'm very confused by why I do not have permissions in a certain folder. I installed an app called Grafana which created a user and a group called "grafana" and created some files in /var/lib/grafana/ with ownership to "grafana".

operator@pop-os:/var/lib/grafana$ ls -la
total 780
drwxr-xr-x  5 grafana grafana   4096 Mar 10 14:21 .
drwxr-xr-x 76 root    root      4096 Mar  7 12:09 ..
drwxr-x---  3 grafana grafana   4096 Mar  7 12:09 alerting
drwx------  2 grafana grafana   4096 Mar  7 12:09 csv
-rw-r-----  1 grafana grafana 774144 Mar 10 04:21 grafana.db
drwx------  2 grafana grafana   4096 Mar  7 12:09 png

I'm trying to create a new folder called "plugins" and copy some files in to it but I keep getting "Permission denied".

I have tried adding my user account to the group "grafana" with sudo usermod -aG grafana operator and I even tried adding my account to root group sudo usermod -aG root operator and I still don't have permission. I've tried logging out of account and back in to refresh permissions and it doesn't help.

I can use sudo mkdir plugins but that will create a folder with "root" as the owner, which I don't want because I think Grafana will not be able to access this folder.

What is actually the proper way to create a new folder that belongs to user/group "grafana" but I can still access it with user "operator" if I want to change some content in it?

Solution

The command you search for is:

sudo -u grafana mkdir plugins 

This will execute the command as user grafana and keep the ownership at eh rest of the directories.

Answered By - Romeo Ninov

Answer Checked By - Candace Johnson (WPSolving Volunteer)