Smarty permissions problems

Question

Smarty is complaining about permissions. I've written a small mvc framework for a project I'm working on and I need to be able to render templates in each controller. I went ahead and followed the Smarty installation instructions, and set all of the configuration options in my "front controller", or the page that routes requests to the rest of the application. The testinstall function says everything is kosher, yet when I attempt to render templates in my controllers, I end up with this.

Warning: mkdir(): Permission denied in /var/www/HRTRL/includes/CallLog/lib/Smarty/libs/sysplugins/smarty_internal_write_file.php on line 28 Warning: rename(/tmp/wrt6piczo,./templates_c/73b1662b4c376f493278f9873564df03430a0b43.file.poopy.tpl.php): No such file or directory in /var/www/HRTRL/includes/CallLog/lib/Smarty/libs/sysplugins/smarty_internal_write_file.php on line 48 Warning: chmod(): No such file or directory in /var/www/HRTRL/includes/CallLog/lib/Smarty/libs/sysplugins/smarty_internal_write_file.php on line 50 Warning: include(./templates_c/73b1662b4c376f493278f9873564df03430a0b43.file.poopy.tpl.php): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /var/www/HRTRL/includes/CallLog/lib/Smarty/libs/sysplugins/smarty_internal_template.php on line 423 Warning: include(): Failed opening './templates_c/73b1662b4c376f493278f9873564df03430a0b43.file.poopy.tpl.php' for inclusion (include_path='.:/usr/share/php:/usr/share/pear') in /var/www/HRTRL/includes/CallLog/lib/Smarty/libs/sysplugins/smarty_internal_template.php on line 423

I have tested the rest of my framework independently and everything seems to work. My "front controller" routes requests properly to the correct controllers, and I seem to be able to render regular HTML just fine.

Additionally, I have chmodded all of the Smarty library folders as well as the other required directories to 777 just for the sake of testing. I'm still receiving the same permissions errors.

EDIT

These are the settings I've used for all the required smarty folders.

$smarty->setTemplateDir('lib/smarty/templates');
$smarty->setCompileDir('lib/smarty/templates_c');
$smarty->setCacheDir('lib/smarty/cache');
$smarty->setConfigDir('lib/smarty/configs');

Answer 1

Proper permissions solved it for me:

chown -R www-data /var/www/HRTRL

Answer 2

Could it be a problem with relative paths? Could you add the complete paths for you set****Dir functions, so you'll be sure you're using the correct locations.

If you call this from a /specialdir/thisdirhasonlyaPHPfile/file.php location, you might get in trouble.