[arch-dev-public] Uniform handling of webservers

[Tobias Kieslich]

On Fri, 30 Mar 2007, Aaron Griffin wrote:
> 1. shall we continuing using nobody as primary www user(group) or now
>    when we unify things go and create a dedicated wwwuser with a
>    reasonable set of permissions?
> 2. shall we create subdirs /srv/www/{httpd,lighttpd} per webserver as
>    some people suggested? Web administration is an administrators job -
>    not a package managers.
> 3. If we create subdirs, shall we have some magic that routes localhost
>    automatically $wwwhome of the latest installed webserver? Do we wanna
>    have magic at all?
> 4. Subdirs per webserver leave us with the issue, that we do not have a
>    distinct directory, where we can install apps like phpMyAdmin per
>    default to work out of the box. This is bad IMHO. The issue can be
>    partially resolved by aliases or vhosts, but this requires both user
>    interaction and some config tweaking, as lighttpd does not support easy
>    *.conf handling with the vhost handling as apache does. There might be
>    a way, but I have to investigate that. Also, this might mean that we will
>    have to create special handlings per possibly installed webserver in the
>    phpmyadmin.install post_insall(), I would like to get away without
>    it!

Ok, I like a uniform place for all packages that we install into a
docroot, such as phpmyadmin. Jan proposed /usr/share/* which I don't
like because there might be packages that talk to more than jus a db and
eventually wanna write into docroot. Then the packages must have proper
wwwuser permission etc. And if they don't belong to root I don't wanna
have them in /usr/share. Moreover, as Aaaron pointed out, not all
webserver support conf.d magic with easy aliases.

Romans approach with symlinking has the problem that apache does not has
FollowSymLinks turned on by default and we should not turn that on as
admins expect the opposite. As far as the conflicts for /srv/www are
concerned, the only file that conflicts is the index.html, this is the
smallest problem IMHO.

I'm still open for /srv/www/{apache.lighty} etc as long as we find a
good way for packages like phpmyadmin, phpbb etc. I like to have
convinient way to have any installed webserver working out of the box
but not for the price of a hard time to change it to individual
configuration which would have to be restored after every update.

	-T

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