downgrade/README.md

Sets the user identity of the process to `www-data`

# downgrade [![travis][travis-image]][travis-url] [![npm][npm-image]][npm-url] [![downloads][downloads-image]][downloads-url] [![javascript style guide][standard-image]][standard-url]

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[travis-url]: https://travis-ci.org/feross/downgrade
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[npm-url]: https://npmjs.org/package/downgrade
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[downloads-url]: https://npmjs.org/package/downgrade
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### Sets the user identity of the process to `www-data`

## install

```
npm install downgrade
```

## usage

To attempt to set the user identity of the process to `www-data` (a good default on most
linux systems):

```js
var downgrade = require('downgrade')

downgrade()
```

Or, to set the user identity to a specific ID:

```js
downgrade('username', 'group')
```

The arguments can be either a numerical ID or a username/group string. If a string is
specified, this method blocks while resolving it to a numerical ID.

If the current user's permissions do not allow the user identity to be changed, this
function will do nothing (no-op).

For best results, start your node process as `root`, run actions that require `root`
privileges, then downgrade the user permissions.

On non-posix platforms (e.g. Windows), this module does nothing.

## license

MIT. Copyright (c) [Feross Aboukhadijeh](http://feross.org).