title: Granting user permissions using sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /dir/ectory/
body: <p>I am following this tutorial: <a href="https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-apache-virtual-hosts-on-ubuntu-14-04-lts" rel="noreferrer">How To Set Up Apache Virtual Hosts on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS</a>.</p>
  
  <p>I get an error on: <strong>Step Two — Grant Permissions</strong> which states the following:</p>
  
  <blockquote>
    <p>Now we have the directory structure for our files, but they are owned
    by our root user. If we want our regular user to be able to modify
    files in our web directories, we can change the ownership by doing
    this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/example.com/public_html
  sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /var/www/test.com/public_html
  </code></pre>
    
    <p>The $USER variable will take the value of the user you are currently
    logged in as when you press "ENTER". By doing this, our regular user
    now owns the public_html subdirectories where we will be storing our
    content.</p>
    
    <p>We should also modify our permissions a little bit to ensure that read
    access is permitted to the general web directory and all of the files
    and folders it contains so that pages can be served correctly:</p>
  
  <pre><code>sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www
  </code></pre>
    
    <p>Your web server should now have the permissions it needs to serve
    content, and your user should be able to create content within the
    necessary folders.</p>
  </blockquote>
  
  <p>I typed in the line in Command Line: <code>sudo chown -R $USER:$USER /dir/ectory/</code>
  and then I get an error which says: <code>chown: invalid group: ‘developer:developer’</code></p>
  
  <p>I have searched and found no working solutions to this problem.
  I am using Ubuntu 14.04. I'm both new to Ubuntu and Stackoverflow so I apologise for any stupid mistakes that I mightn't made while asking the question. Any help is grealy appreciated!</p>