Is there a way to include configuration settings in Apache based on if a directory exists? Basically I have a portable hard drive that I transport between work and home that has some stuff I'm developing on it. I only want the Apache config to load a particular virtual host if the folder exists.
Since Apache 2.4.34 you can now use <IfFile>...</IfFile> which will check to see if a file exists. There's more details on the <IfFile> page.
No, there seems to be no direct way to do this.
The only thing that might be a solution is the IfDefine directive. You can define defines using the -d parameter to when the server is started.
The parameter-name argument is a define as given on the httpd command line via -Dparameter-, at the time the server was started.
You might be able to check for the existence of a directory in a batch or bash file, and set the -d parameter accordingly.
Whether that is an option, will depend on how your server is started from the portable hard drive.
I've come up with a solution that seems to work for Linux and OS X, and it hinges on "mountpoints". It might be possible to emulate it within Windows, as well, but you would probably have to get creative with FUSE and/or Cygwin.
If you create an empty folder in your home directory, such as "/Users/username/ExtraVhosts", you can add an apache directive to "Include /Users/username/ExtraVhosts/*".
Then, when you insert your thumb drive, you can mount somewhere and then use mountpoint "binding" to cross-link the ExtraVhosts folder to a folder on the mobile device.
An OS X example:
I have a thumb drive called 'Cherrybomb'
When I insert it, it always gets mounted to /Volumes/Cherrybomb
I can then use bindfs (sudo port install bindfs) to mount a subfolder of it, like so:
sudo bindfs /Volumes/Cherrybomb/Projects/vhosts /Users/username/ExtraVhosts
Then I can restart apache to read in the updated configuration:
sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl restart
At that point, it's just a matter of adding entries in /etc/hosts for server aliases to get picked up.
The linux equivalent would be using the "--bind" parameter of the mount command.
One caveat: This makes it difficult to quickly unmount the USB drive, since it is always marked as "in use" by apache. Here's a removal procedure:
Close all open files and terminal sessions that are using the drive (the present-working-directory in terminal can cause unmount issues)
Stop apache: sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl stop
umount /Users/username/ExtraVhosts
Then you can either unmount it graphically or manually (umount /Volumes/Cherrybomb).
If your work and home machines mount the drive to different locations, you could have multiple vhosts folders - home_vhost, work_vhost, etc - and use that in the binding step.
I hope this helps someone out :)
If you point apache to the mountpoint only there shouldn't be an issue. Just don't point Directory directives to directories within the drive.
eg, if you mount /dev/somedisk /mnt/somevhost, the
/mnt/somevhost directory will be there whether or not you have the drive mounted and apache will start. Apache doesn't care if the directory is empty so a <Directory "/mnt/somevhost"/> won't cause server to not start if the drive isn't mounted.
Work with UNIX not against it :-p This solution should be sufficient for development.
Related
I am trying to fix one venerability on my production web server(Apache), Venerability is "The HTTP headers sent by the remote web server disclose information that can aid an attacker, such as the server version and technologies used by the web server"
For this I have gone for some solutions , some where I found that to solve the above Venerability we need to edit the httpd.conf file on server but I did not find httpd.conf file in my entire system (using windows 10 os) can any one please let me know hot find that file or how to resolve that Venerability on production ?
You can find httpd.conf in
installed folder ex Apache24
Apache24/conf/httpd.conf
On Windows, I have seen people run Apache from all kinds of weird and wonderful places.
You need to track down where your Apache instance is running from, normally its running as a service on windows. If you open the properties on the service and look at the Path to executable, it should be something similar to the below.
"C:\Program Files\Apache24\bin\httpd.exe" -k runservice
Or it could be
"D:\Some Application\Version\WEB\tool\SOFTS\HTTPD\bin\httpd.exe" -k runservice
Unless there is an -f flag, setting the location of the conf. There will be a "conf" folder at the same level as the "bin" folder regardless of the path. This location is set at compile time so unless you have bespoke version off Apache this should be the location.
If you are struggling to find the service or a launcher that is running Apache. You can use WMI with a WQL query to look for processes which are called httpd.exe and get its executable path.
wmic process WHERE name="httpd.exe" GET ExecutablePath
In Xampp Control panel, in apache row, click on "config" button and then you see the term Apache(httpd.conf).
I am still an Apache noob, and I am trying to set an environment variable that will be used by my Rails application.
I've read https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_env.html#setenv and done some google and SO searches. I have at least determined that the value to be assigned must be in quotes. However, when I run sudo service apache2 restart, the value of SECRET_KEY_BASE is still not correct (viewed via printenv). I don't know what I don't know. Is there some step i'm missing?
In my apache configuration I have:
SetEnv SECRET_KEY_BASE "e10e721..."
# Tell Apache and Passenger where your app's 'public' directory is
DocumentRoot /var/www/some_path
Please let me know what other information I might need to share. Thanks for looking.
There are a few subtle pitfalls here.
First: You can't check it in the terminal you ran that command from. "SetEnv" sets a per-request internal variable that will be copied to CGI-like processes that the server subsequently executes.
Secondly, even if you set a real native environment variable (in e.g. /etc/apache2/envvars) you should not do a restart operation since that will not necessarily reload that particular file. You should do a stop and a start. You still won't see the variable in the command you start the server from, since it was only in the webserver process.
If you want to see the environment of a running process, you can write a basic CGI to dump the environment that was passed down to the CGI script. If you're a PHP user, a basic script with phpinfo() will dump it.
Or, you can determine Apache's process ID with ps and then check /proc/$thepid/env (on Linux).
we are looking for a way to point our Apache DocumentRoot to a symlink.
E.g. DocumentRoot /var/www/html/finalbuild
finalbuild should point to a folder somewhere like /home/user/build3
when we move a new build to /home/user/build4 we want to use a shell script that changes the symbolic link "finalebuild" to this new directory /home/user/build4 and do an apache graceful restart to have a new web application version up and running with little risk.
What's the best way to create this symlink and to change this link afterwards using the shell script?
We're using capistrano to employ a similar setup. However, we've run into a few problems:
After switching to the setup, things appeared to be going fine, but then we started noticing that after running cap deploy, even though the symlink had been changed to point toward the head revision, the browser would still show the old pages, even after multiple refreshes and appending different GET parameters.
At first, we thought it was browser caching, so for development we disabled browser caching via HTTP headers, but this didn't change anything. I then checked to make sure we weren't doing full-page caching server-side, and we weren't. But I then noticed that if I deleted a file in the revision the symlink used to point to, we would get a 404, so Apache was serving up new pages, but it was still following the "old symlink" and serving the pages up from the wrong directory.
This is on shared hosting, so I wasn't able to restart Apache. So I tried deleting the symlink and creating a new one each time. This seemed to work sometimes, but not reliably. It worked probably 25~50% of the time.
Eventually, I found that if I:
removed the existing symlink (deleting it or renaming it);
made a page request, causing Apache to attempt to resolve the symlink but find it missing (resulting in a 404)
then created a new symlink to the new directory
it would cause the docroot to be updated properly most of the time. However, even this isn't perfect, and about 2-5% of the time, when the deploy script ran wget to fetch a page right after renaming the old symlink, it would return the old page rather than a 404.
It seems like Apache is either caching the filesystem, or perhaps the mv command only changed the filesystem in memory while Apache was reading from the filesystem on disk (doesn't really make any sense). In either case, I've taken up someone's recommendation to run sync after the symlink changes, which should get the filesystem on disk in sync with memory, and perhaps the slight delay will also help the wget to return a 404.
I've used symlinks as the apache DocumentRoot in production with no graceful restart necessary. In general, the idea should work. A 403 error probably indicates a permissions error unrelated to the symlink changing. An added wrinkle that you would want to add is making the symlink switch atomic so the symlink always exists. That is to say, at no time is the symlink nonexistent, even for a moment.
The solution to this problem is to effect the change by creating a new symlink and then renaming it over the old symlink. On Unix-like systems, renaming is an atomic operation, and thus the symlink “change” will be atomic too. By hand, the process looks like this:
$ ln -s new current_tmp && mv -Tf current_tmp current
I run a django application over apache with mod_wsgi, using WAMP.
A certain URL allows me to stream the content of image files, the paths of which are stored in database.
The files can be located whether on local machine or under network drive (\\my\network\folder).
With the development server (manage.py runserver), I have no trouble at all reading and streaming the files.
With WAMP, and with network drive files, I get a IOError : obviously because the httpd instance does not have read permission on said drive.
In the task manager, I see that httpd.exe is run by SYSTEM. I would like to tell WAMP to run the server as [myself] as I have read and write permissions on the shared folder. (eventually, the production server should be run by a 'www-admin' user having the permissions)
Mapping the network shared folder on a drive letter (Z: for instance) does not solve this at all.
The User/Group directives in httpd.conf do not seem to have any kind of influence on Apache's behaviour.
I've also regedited : I tried to duplicate the HKLM\[...]\wampapache registry key under HK_CURRENT_USER\ and rename the original key, but then the new key does not seem to be found when I cmd this
> httpd.exe -n wampapache -k start
or when I run WAMP.
I've run out of ideas :)
Has anybody ever had the same issue?
Win+R, services.msc
edit wampapache and wampmysqld to log on as some user.
the tray icon is a convenient front end to "net start wampapache" and "net start wampmysqld"
The User/Group directives in httpd.conf do not seem to have any kind of influence on Apache's behaviour.
httpd.exe is started by the root user (this is probably why you see it running under SYSTEM). The user and group lines in httpd.conf determine what user the child processes (that httpd spawns) will run under. These forks are what actually handle page requests, etc. so it is possible that your configuration is already doing what you want it to, it is just unclear from looking at task manager.
You could also try using runas to start WAMP/Apache, though your mileage may vary.
I've just found that executing httpd.exe myself works for me... I just loose all the funky WAMP tray icon, and the "restart apache" menu item, really handy whenever I update my application code...
I'll have to make do with this for the moment...
We're running a reseller web host, and aliasing a particular directory for ALL the sites within. This is all happening through WHM/Cpanel, which could possibly complicate my question.
We want all hosts to run their "/concrete" directory through a shared location on the server. This is working fine by adding "Alias /concrete/ "/usr/local/share/concrete5/concrete-latest/concrete/" to the apache include editor in WHM.
However, if a local concrete/ directory exists within the particular webroot of the virtual host, we'd rather use that than "/concrete" globally. It would also be nice if we could make this alias change in the context of the virtual host, within WHM (and I haven't found a great way to modify virtual host sections in WHM without hacking a file that I don't believe we're supposed to hack.)
Thoughts?
A primitive, although probably quite effective solution might be to forget about the Alias directive and to simply rely on a symlink. A little shell script that creates those symlinks for you will simply fail if there is already something present that is called 'concrete'.