I’m tired of clients breaking their sites and then complaining about it saying it’s an issue with the server, when in reality it’s 100% their fault to begin with. I’ve ran into a few issues where clients needed something set in their php.ini or .htaccess in order for their site to work, such as “allow_url_fopen” or “register_globals”. So to make things easier on the client I would set these variables for them and get their site working. Normally I would not hear back from the client if they left things alone, but it seems like lately the inexperienced clients have been getting the urge to modify the changes I’ve made, thus breaking their site an either getting either a 500 or some other kind of error. To prevent something like this from happening, you can go in an change the file attributes to keep them from screwing things up by using chattr. Chattr is also useful for important files on the server, as it can prevent people from removing those critical files from the server.

The letters select the new attributes for the files: append only (a), compressed (c), no dump (d), immutable  (i),  data journalling  (j),  secure deletion (s), no tail-merging (t), undeletable (u), no atime updates (A), synchronous directory updates (D), synchronous updates (S), and top of directory hierarchy (T).

Using chattr is pretty straight forward as the syntax is not too complicated. The command below would add the A and I attributes to the file, thus making it read-only so that it cannot be deleted nor modified

chattr +ai /home/clay/public_html/.htaccess

To remove the file attributes you would simply replace the “+” with “-” like so.

chattr -ai /home/clay/public_html/.htaccess

There are other attributes that can used with chattr but “AI” are the ones I commonly use. Now you can have fun using chattr to prevent clients from changing files they shouldn’t be changing.

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