php: mkdir permission denied

I know this is an old thread, but it needs a better answer. You shouldn't need to set the permissions to 777, that is a security problem as it gives read and write access to the world. It may be that your apache user does not have read/write permissions on the directory.

Here's what you do in Ubuntu

Make sure all files are owned by the Apache group and user. In Ubuntu it is the www-data group and user

sudo chown -R www-data:www-data /path/to/webserver/www

Next enabled all members of the www-data group to read and write files

sudo chmod -R g+rw /path/to/webserver/www

The php mkdir() function should now work without returning errors