Serving vmware shared folders

vmware's shared folders are a little strange to me. I'm having trouble running web apps from them because of owners and permissions

On the guest machine, first run

$ sudo umount -l /mnt/hgfs

Next, in /etc/fstab, add the options uid=[user],gid=[group] to the /mnt/hgfs entry so that it looks more or less like the following:

.host:/ /mnt/hgfs vmhgfs defaults,ttl=5,uid=[user],gid=[group] 0 0

(To see all the mount options for hgfs, run mount.vmhgfs --help.)

After that, remount /mnt/hgfs and verify that your folder now has [user] as its owner and group