I recently upgraded my server from Ubuntu 16.04 to 18.04, and have hit some snags in the process.

I've had my mailman3 installation under my home directory, running as my own user, without too many problems. var_dir was set to something in my home directory. Recently, while tracking down some weird behavior, I realized that with this sort of setup I'm supposed to use "layout: local", and that previously I'd had a sort of weird half-way installation where some things were kept in my /home/<me>/sites/mailman directory, and other bits (pids and whatnot) were scattered around the filesystem.

Now that I'm using "layout: local", mailman really is trying to keep everything under that main directory, and now everything's breaking. The hyperkitty search indexer is saying it has no permissions to write into that directory, postfix won't deliver mail, saying the mailbox is unavailable, and in the web UI postorius shows no configured list domains (though hyperkitty still displays the archives correctly).

So obviously I've got quite a big problem with permissions, but I don't know how to resolve it. My webserver is nginx, running as www-data. I'm starting mailman in a systemd script, with User and Group set to my user -- though maybe that should be set to root? I guess postfix runs as root, I'm not sure, but obviously it's not able to read the files in var/data/*, which appear all correct to me.

What's the recommended solution here? I'd still like to keep this whole directory under my home directory, if possible...

Thanks, Eric