Umask Permissions in a Puma Production Environment

Wed, 18 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Recently I was having an issue with a Sinatra application deployed in a staging server. The application was deployed with Puma and Nginx in the following location:

/var/www/

This web service would then try to access some files in another directory on the server, mounted as an SFTP directory. The Sinatra app would open these files and generate some new files from them, depending on the HTTP request received.

The problem was that the operation would fail due to a permissions issue. I was baffled since I had set read and write permissions to the directory and the files in it.

Umask: The Problem and Solution

It took around two days to find the culprit: umask. In Linux, umask acts as another set of permissions for processes and cannot be set for directories, basically speaking.

I realized that this probably meant that the process running the Puma application server had a umask configuration that was not allowing the generation of new files.

I decided to test this if this was the case. In the Puma documentation, I found an option to change the permissions of the UNIX socket using umask:

sinatra on Andrés Álvarez

Umask Permissions in a Puma Production Environment

Umask: The Problem and Solution