How do I preserve file permissions after compressing and moving as tarball?

Question

I seem to be frequently encountering a situation when I compress files of a Drupal site as a tarball from a production server to the public_html folder of my local machine.

The permissions seem to get messed up and I usually end up with a filesystem not readable error and deleting a few files in the sites/default/files directory during the process of changing the permissions.

How can I preserve these permissions when the folder is compressed and copied to a new folder or is it an issue with the permissions of the destination folder?

Answer 1

I move sites as tarballs between servers fairly often when I can't deploy with rsync or git.

According to the man page:

-p, --preserve-permissions
extract information about file permissions (default for superuser)

is the proper option to use. However, this never works well for me.

Typically, I will just use normal tar options, and then run a script after the fact to fix things up.

The Securing file permissions and ownership article has a very good script. As that gets adjusted from time to time, I am not going to reproduce it here. It essentially does some find/chown/chmods on the tree to fix things up.

I would use this script as a starting point for your needs. One thing that it doesn't address is having the private:// filesystem outside of docroot, which I always use. I will also use 2775 as the permission for the public:// path, as well as a separate use for core/contrib and the site specific code.