Error: EACCES: permission denied, only in VSCode using Remote SSH

Question

I can find plenty of references to this error, but they all point to permission issues, however my permissions appear to be fine as I can modify this folder using nano and SSH.

I'm trying to use RemoteSSH with a custom user account, user

The server is running Debian 11 and nginx

I have key based auth and I connect to the server. When I try to create or remove a file in the web folder (/var/www/html) I get this error message Error: EACCES: permission denied, <what I was trying to do, i.e. rename a file, or delete a file>

I can do all of these things using a standard SSH connection (openSSH built in to Windows 10)

The owner of /var/www/ is set to www-data (recursively)

user is a member of the group www-data

Do I need to do anything in VSCode to update permissions? Am I missing something else?

Here are the exact commands I used:

sudo adduser user www-data
sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /var/www
sudo chmod -R 0775 /var/www

Answer 1

OK I did a bit more Googling right after posting this, and I was able to fix this by deleting the .vscode-server folder in the home directory.

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-remote-release/issues/3399#issuecomment-922935448

I'm not sure if there is an easier way to fix this without doing so, or having to do that every time permissions are changed.