# Stuck @ CHOWN for /var/www/discourse
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/stuck-chown-for-var-www-discourse/74138
**Category:** Self-hosting
**Created:** [2017年十一月15日 23:16 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/stuck-chown-for-var-www-discourse/74138 "2017-11-15T23:16:48Z")
**Posts on this page:** 16
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@pinkphoenix](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pinkphoenix)
#### Post date: [2017年十一月15日 23:16 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/stuck-chown-for-var-www-discourse/74138/1 "2017-11-15T23:16:48Z")
**Hey All**
I’ve run through the installation process multiple times now. Unfortunately, each time the entire process comes to a complete halt at
```
cd /var/www/discourse && chown -R discourse /var/www/discourse
```
I’ve tried to create the folder myself, since it didn’t even exist, but it doesn’t seem to have any impact. I’ve rebooted multiple times as well. I’m at a loss here.
---
### Author:  [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [2017年十一月15日 23:31 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/stuck-chown-for-var-www-discourse/74138/2 "2017-11-15T23:31:31Z")
What installation instructions are you following? It doesn’t look like [discourse/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md at main · discourse/discourse · GitHub](https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/docs/INSTALL-cloud.md). Are you installing a development environment?
---
### Author:  [@pinkphoenix](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pinkphoenix)
#### Post date: [2017年十一月15日 23:38 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/stuck-chown-for-var-www-discourse/74138/3 "2017-11-15T23:38:33Z")
That’s exactly the guide that I’ve been following. I practically copy and paste all the commands into my terminal. It’s when I get the ./discourse-setup running… I get past putting all the information in… and then it goes through all the lines of configuring and installing everything.
Unfortunately, it installs some bundler-1.16.0, after doing a bunch of nginx stuff, and then gets stuck at the cd /var/www/discourse && chown -R discourse /var/www/discourse
I was wondering why it got stuck… so I went to look for the folder myself to see if I could manually grant it the proper ownership/permissions… but the folder doesn’t even exist.
Everything is being run as sudo. I’m on Ubuntu 17.1.
---
### Author:  [@pinkphoenix](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pinkphoenix)
#### Post date: [2017年十一月15日 23:44 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/stuck-chown-for-var-www-discourse/74138/4 "2017-11-15T23:44:30Z")
Oh dear!
I am such a sillyhead. Apparently, on my machine at least, it takes over 10 minutes to get past that step. It seems to be flowing right through the rest of the setup now!
So sorry, and thank you!
---
### Author:  [@schungx](https://meta.discourse.org/u/schungx)
#### Post date: [2017年十一月16日 03:09 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/stuck-chown-for-var-www-discourse/74138/5 "2017-11-16T03:09:28Z")
Yup, it cam take up to 30min for a fresh install and 20min for a rebuild. You probably should scale up to a high cpu vm for the install then scale back down afterwards.
---
### Author:  [@mpalmer](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mpalmer)
#### Post date: [2017年十一月16日 03:21 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/stuck-chown-for-var-www-discourse/74138/6 "2017-11-16T03:21:49Z")
A `chown` run is going to be disk-bound, not CPU-bound. I’m wondering what sort of archaic storage system you’ve got that it takes 10 minutes to `chown` the app tree.
---
### Author:  [@pinkphoenix](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pinkphoenix)
#### Post date: [2017年十一月17日 10:16 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/stuck-chown-for-var-www-discourse/74138/7 "2017-11-17T10:16:46Z")
Probably :sadpanda:
I had been running the server off an SSD until recently. That ended up completely dying on me (it was a fairly old SSD, so I was kind of expecting it to happen eventually). The server’s currently running on some old laptop HDD that I had laying around.
Thanks for the reply! Glad to know that the process will speed up once I can get my hands on another SSD for the server!
---
### Author:  [@schungx](https://meta.discourse.org/u/schungx)
#### Post date: [2017年十一月25日 06:46 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/stuck-chown-for-var-www-discourse/74138/8 "2017-11-25T06:46:36Z")
I realize that `chown` doesn’t always run slow. It is only when there has been a previous, _unsuccessful_ attempt at rebuild.
If it is a fresh rebuild, then `chown` seems to complete very quickly. If there has been a previous failed rebuild (e.g. a typo in `app.yml`), then it takes forever to `chown`. Perhaps the old files are still there?
---
### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [2017年十一月25日 06:53 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/stuck-chown-for-var-www-discourse/74138/9 "2017-11-25T06:53:30Z")
Maybe you can time it, and test this hypothesis and get us some data?
---
### Author:  [@schungx](https://meta.discourse.org/u/schungx)
#### Post date: [2017年十一月29日 09:52 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/stuck-chown-for-var-www-discourse/74138/10 "2017-11-29T09:52:14Z")
Well, I have done it several times since then. All clean `./launcher rebuild app` without prior failures.
Run on multiple VM’s with the same sizes, RAM and CPU’s.
Sometimes the `chown` complete within _seconds_. Sometimes the `chown` takes _forever_. And the larger installations may be the fast ones.
I’ll experiment some more…
BTW… it may have something to do with running `./launcher cleanup` prior. It seems that `chown` runs very fast after a cleanup, but need more evidences.
EDIT: My VM’s all have 2 CPU’s, 3GB RAM and HDD (not SSD). So this may magnify the impacts of `chown` a bit.
---
### Author:  [@codinghorror](https://meta.discourse.org/u/codinghorror)
#### Post date: [2017年十一月29日 10:03 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/stuck-chown-for-var-www-discourse/74138/11 "2017-11-29T10:03:14Z")
---
### Author:  [@schungx](https://meta.discourse.org/u/schungx)
#### Post date: [2017年十一月30日 01:24 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/stuck-chown-for-var-www-discourse/74138/12 "2017-11-30T01:24:04Z")
Well, `cleanup` isn’t it. Cleaned up and `chown` still took 7 minutes. Back to the drawing board.
---
### Author:  [@Cameron\_D](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Cameron_D)
#### Post date: [2018年五月3日 10:23 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/stuck-chown-for-var-www-discourse/74138/13 "2018-05-03T10:23:55Z")
Hi, bit of a bump, but I have had the same problem since I first tried Discourse.
From my understanding, `chown` will set the ownership of all files, irregardless of the current owner. Of course after the first setup the files should already be owned by the `discourse` user, so there is no need to change them _all_, just the new ones.
On my install I’ve changed the `web.template.yml` to use `find` to change only files that aren’t already owned by `discourse`. That part of a rebuild used to take 8+ minutes (VM on ZFS with no SSD) and now its almost instant.
There are a couple of instances of `chown` in the template, but I think the “main” one is this one:
>
Which I’ve replaced with:
```bash
find $home ! -user discourse -exec chown discourse {} \+
```
Which finds all files not owned by `discourse` and executes `chown` on them.
---
### Author:  [@dnsmichi](https://meta.discourse.org/u/dnsmichi)
#### Post date: [2018年五月30日 09:01 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/stuck-chown-for-var-www-discourse/74138/14 "2018-05-30T09:01:39Z")
Maybe could this be put into the native application template?
I haven’t rebuilt the app on disk for a while now, since the upgrade via web admin console works like a charm. Upgrading in the docker container works different to the shell rebuild as far as I would guess for now.
git pulled plenty of changes.
```plaintext
1392 files changed, 63951 insertions(+), 41658 deletions(-)
```
I don’t have exact times, but I’d say 10 minutes at least where the Docker container was just idle with chown (did a docker exec to inspect what it was doing). System here is running with limited IOPs on a hosting platform.
One could also install `parallel` or alter the way find executes chown in multiple processes, e.g. per directory. Would such make sense for a PR?
---
### Author:  [@mpalmer](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mpalmer)
#### Post date: [2018年五月30日 22:55 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/stuck-chown-for-var-www-discourse/74138/15 "2018-05-30T22:55:38Z")
> [@dnsmichi](#):
>
> One could also install `parallel` or alter the way find executes chown in multiple processes, e.g. per directory. Would such make sense for a PR?
If you’re IOPS bound, trying to run multiple IOPS-heavy instances of an operation in parallel is unlikely to provide any benefit.
---
### Author:  [@dnsmichi](https://meta.discourse.org/u/dnsmichi)
#### Post date: [2018年五月31日 10:31 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/stuck-chown-for-var-www-discourse/74138/16 "2018-05-31T10:31:37Z")
True that, didn’t think of that. Thanks 🙂 I don’t know whether the partial chown brings some general performance improvements, I’ll need to test that.