Permission Scheme for WordPress

I am self-hosting an installation on a virtual server at /var/www/html/site. Root owns everything from /var/www down. WP documents indicate WP should be owned by a user, I assume not root. I don’t want to use ftp on this, only ssh, but presently cannot add modules via browser due to a rights issue.
1 – Do you create a least priviledged user to own WP? At what level, ie /var/www or lower?
2- How does that affect Apache?

Any thing else I should do to get plugins working?

Thanks,
Harry