Permissions for www root folder for non root user

I need to allow a non-root user to access (read and write) the webserver's web root folder /var/www/html. I need some help on how to best accomplish this. I want to avoid setting permissions too broadly.

Currently, permissions are as follows:

root@prodwww:/# ls -al /var/www/
total 12
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root     4096 Aug  6 08:52 .
drwxr-xr-x 15 root root     4096 Aug  6 08:52 ..
drwxr-x---  8 root www-data 4096 Aug 18 21:45 html
root@prodwww:/#

and within /var/www/html

root@prodwww:/# ls -al /var/www/html/
total 88
drwxr-x---  8 root www-data  4096 Aug 18 21:45  .
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root      4096 Aug  6 08:52  ..
...
-rw-r-----  1 root www-data   628 Jul  7  2016  _htaccesss
-rw-r--r--  1 root root     10918 Aug 18 21:45  index.html
...
root@prodwww:/#

The user is in the group users but if I changed the folder's group to 'users', then www-data (Apache web server) group could not access.

Should I

• add www-data to group users and change /var/www/html 's group to users?
• add the user's account to the www-data group?
• create a new group and add the user's account and the apache user account to that group and change the folders group to the new group?
• perhaps set Apache (www-data) as the owner and set the group to users?
• do something else?

If your files/folder has frequently updated, it's better to create a new user E.g:

sudo useradd myuser

then change Apache user:

sudo nano /etc/apache2/envvars

to:

export APACHE_RUN_USER=myuser
export APACHE_RUN_GROUP=myuser

Then change recursively the chmod to 755 or 744:

sudo chown myuser:myuser /var/www/html
sudo chmod -R 755 /var/www/html

another option you can use www-data as group and add myuser to the group.