Linux file administration falls short of what I am used to on Windows. In particular only one user or group have have permissions on a file. In Windows you can create as many groups as you like each with different permissions on a resource and then drop users into them. On Linux you can only have one owner and group for each resource. (Actually you can use acl:access control lists in some distributions but this is very challenging without a graphical UI).

This causes a particular problem for administering the htdocs directory. This is owned by a user such as “developer1” who has rwx permission and a group “apache” say that only has rx permission.

If you want two developers to have rw access you have to use this official hack. For the second developer create a user with the same UID as developer1.

When logged in as developer1:

sudo useradd -s /bin/bash -o -u `id -u` -g `id -g` developer1

More details including how to set up ssh keys on bitnami Ubuntu are given here. If you are using Webmin you can configure the ssh server to automatically create new keys.

These users will now have identical file permission but different logins so you can control and audit their access.