I followed the steps from https://askubuntu.com/a/51337/115811 to add my user to a www-data group and set the /var/www/ dir group writeable.

sudo adduser <username> www-data

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www

sudo chmod -R g+rw /var/www

This is /var/www/ contents:

drwxrwsr-x  2 www-data www-data 4096 Oct 25 08:13 ./

drwxr-xr-x 14 root     root     4096 Oct 17 08:47 ../

-rwxrwsr-x  1 www-data www-data  177 Oct 17 23:51 index.html*

However when I try to git clone or mkdir in /var/www/, I am still getting "Permission denied". What am I missing?