Best practices for web development on linux

Hi everybody,

I was trying to set up a php development environment on Ubuntu using Intellij IDEA.

I installed apache and set up a website under /web directory. The directory is owned by www-data:www-data.

The question is: how do I set up IDEA so that it is able to modify files under this directory.

I tried hack:

Edit www-data home directory, sudo -u www-data and start idea from www home directory. It almost worked expect for git. Git was trying to access my user's home directory. Perhaps because I was cloning using my username and sudo.

So it didn't work as well.

How do you develop on linux machines? Please share. Thank you.