500 Internal Error when loading custom PHP files

Hi! I’m working on a website that utilizes PHP (non-wordpress), but when I navigate to the .php page via browser, the server throws a 500 error. I check the errors log and found this:

[Sat Aug 15 03:02:28.620341 2020] [:error] [pid 24454:tid 47133828941568] [client 66.115.145.55:6204] SoftException in Application.cpp:261: File “/home/jonath29/public_html/drawbridge/careers-php/apply-here.php” is writeable by group

I figured it had something to do with permissions, so I changed the permissions for the php folder a few times to no avail. I’m out of ideas at the moment; what do you think is throwing the error? Thanks!

In Linux (which is what we use on all our servers) folders can have different permissions than the files inside of them so in addition to changin permissions on a parent folder you need to make sure the files have the right permissions. For our servers those permissions that work best are 644 for files and 755 for folders. I would try adjusting the permissions on the file apply-here.php specifically which should work.

If your comfortable in terminal you can also navigate to the public_html folder and run these two commands which fixes all files and folders:

find . -type d -exec chmod 755 {} \;
find . -type f -exec chmod 644 {} \;