I deployed a wordpress site on Ubuntu 20.04 using Nginx.

First I did:

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data .

Which solved issue I had when uploading plugin.

But now, when I connect FTP with my SSH key, using ubuntu user, I can see the files, but not modify them.

I checked the permissions:

ubuntu@ip-172-20-36-190:~/site$ ls -al

total 220

drwxr-xr-x  5 www-data www-data  4096 Mar 18 12:31 .

drwxr-xr-x  7 ubuntu   ubuntu    4096 Mar  5 09:04 ..

-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data   405 Feb  6  2020 index.php

-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data 19915 Mar 10 00:26 license.txt

-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data  7345 Mar 10 00:26 readme.html

-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data  7165 Mar 10 00:26 wp-activate.php

drwxr-xr-x  9 www-data www-data  4096 Feb 22 15:10 wp-admin

-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data   351 Feb  6  2020 wp-blog-header.php

-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data  2328 Oct  8 21:15 wp-comments-post.php

-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data  2913 Feb  6  2020 wp-config-sample.php

-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data  3216 Mar  4 17:06 wp-config.php

drwxr-xr-x  8 www-data www-data  4096 Mar  3 13:23 wp-content

-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data  3939 Jul 30  2020 wp-cron.php

drwxr-xr-x 25 www-data www-data 12288 Mar 10 00:26 wp-includes

-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data  2496 Feb  6  2020 wp-links-opml.php

-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data  3313 Mar 10 00:26 wp-load.php

-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data 44993 Mar 10 00:26 wp-login.php

-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data  8509 Apr 14  2020 wp-mail.php

-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data 21125 Mar 10 00:26 wp-settings.php

-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data 31328 Mar 10 00:26 wp-signup.php

-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data  4747 Oct  8 21:15 wp-trackback.php

-rw-r--r--  1 www-data www-data  3236 Jun  8  2020 xmlrpc.php

I tried to do a chmod -R +w , but I couldn't have write access on my files.

I also tried to add ubuntu user to www-data group, with

sudo usermod -aG www-data $USER

but still, but I couldn't have write access on my files

I did a chmod -R 777 . in all my files, and it worked, is it ok to do that, I have heard it could be a security issue ?

What should be the good way to do it ?