What I'm trying to accomplish is pulling content from a directory that is not the same as the url path. For example:
URL: example.com/
path: /www/production/
Currently, the root url pulls content from the path above. What I want to do is something like this:
URL: example.com/
path: /www/production/root/
So the base URL "example.com" should pull data not from /www/production/ but from /www/production/root/.
I think this is called a Virtual Directory in IIS. Is there something like this in Apache?
Edit for clarification:
I have a ton of existing content that I do not want to have to restructure yet. However, the root site is being completely rebuilt and is going to be quite a bit bigger. What I want is each microsite to have it's own directory, such that requests for example.com/ should pull content from /www/production/root/ while requests for example.com/microsite/ should still pull content from /www/production/microsite/.
Hopefully that makes more sense. :)
Its not exactly clear what your problem is. If you just want all URLs to be taken relative to some location on the server, then you can use the DocumentRoot directive:
DocumentRoot /www/production/root/
If you want to only have certain urls go to the new place, then you can either use the Alias or AliasMatch directives from the mod_alias module. These can map either prefixes on a URL, or url Regexes to other server locations. If even this isn't sufficient, you can use mod_rewrite which allows for arbitrary chains of url rewriting, but can get very hairy to maintain, so you're better off avoiding that module if you can.
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_alias.html
If I understand your question correctly, then the following, in your VirtualHost config, does what you're asking for:
ServerName example.com
DocumentRoot /www/production/root/
Related
For example:
mydomain.com/site1
mydomain.com/site2
I need to install an application on /site1 that will think that it is on the root folder. (In this case PHP, js, CodeIgniter, but could be anything)
So for example, links/references for files such as "/file.jpg" (in code that is in the site1 folder, such as at mydomain.com/site1/code.js) will really load from mydomain.com/site1/file.jpg
And also the code would not be able to see any folder below site1, so that is basically the root folder. And similar thing would be at site2, so the 2 are separate root folders.
I thought this would be some kind of simple .htaccess file installed at mydomain.com/site1 with a redirect, or some kind of a reverse proxy, but so far everything I tried did not work.
I can't seem to find even any such example even on stack overflow..
Any ideas?
The easiest way to do this would be to create an additional VirtualHost, for internal use, called internal1, whose RootDirectory is, you guessed it, /var/www/mydomain.com/htdocs/site1 where the main site is in /var/www/mydomain.com/htdocs.
Then in mydomain.com you reverse proxy /site1 to internal1 (you'll have to put it into /etc/hosts and alias for localhost). The second request will have its DOCUMENT_ROOT point to site1, as requested (and its ServerName changed to internal1):
ProxyPass /site1/ http://internal1/
ProxyPassReverse /site1/ http://internal1/
(Not sure about the trailing slashes)
Now, accessing yourdomain.com/site1/joe.html will trigger a second internal connection to internal1/joe.html, which will contain, say, 'src="/joe.jpg"'; and here's where ProxyPassReverse will come into play, rewriting this in 'src="yourdomain.com/site1/joe.jpg"' so that everything will work.
errata corrige
The above is not correct, thanks #MrWhite for pointing this out. ProxyPassReverse is not enough as it only rewrites headers. From the Apache documentation (emphasis mine):
Only the HTTP response headers specifically mentioned above will be
rewritten. Apache httpd will not rewrite other response headers, nor
will it by default rewrite URL references inside HTML pages. This
means that if the proxied content contains absolute URL references,
they will bypass the proxy. To rewrite HTML content to match the
proxy, you must load and enable mod_proxy_html.
(The method is dirty as all Hell: every HTTP call incurs one extra connection and two rewrites, one going in, a larger one going out).
Of course, if the link is built using e.g. Javascript, it might well be that the proxy code will not recognize it as a link, will leave it unchanged, maybe with the "internal1" name inside somewhere, and the app will break.
However, #arkascha has the right of it - you should cure the cause, not the symptom. You can maybe rewrite the environment of the apps so that they run without troubles even if they are in a subdirectory. Or you could try injecting <base href="https://example.com/site1"> in the output HTML.
basically i have a web server set up where all sites are in /var/www but i want to be able to do development in ~/public_html/sitename so i set userdir's up in apache but the links still goto the /var/www directories pages.
I know i could go in and change all the links, but i think an htaccess would be easier.
So my question is, is it possible to say:
We have a folder in my public_html on home which is accessed via example.com/~jackyyll/project
I want all requests from that project to be redirected to ~/jackyyll/project/request_here
I've tried some things in the .htaccess but nothing is working.
Thanks
If you don't want to use mod_userdir, a simple AliasMatch can do the trick. Here is what I use to map www.kylheku.com/~kaz/ to /home/kaz/public-www/, et cetera, straight from my httpd.conf:
# /~user/blah goes to /home/user/public-www/blah
AliasMatch ^/~([a-z]+)/(.*) /home/$1/public-www/$2
# /~user and goes to /home/user/public-www/
AliasMatch ^/~([a-z]+)$ /home/$1/public-www/
AliasMatch has some capabilities resembling mod_rewrite, except, just like Alias what it does is it takes URL's coming into the server and maps them to paths. The output is not re-injected into the request processing chain. Any URL mapped by Alias or AliasMatch bypasses the VirtualHost-s and their docroots. It's like a special exception mechanism.
The .htaccess in the user's public-www directory works just fine. I have RewriteRules there and other cruft.
Of course, this is a lot simpler than mod_userdir. It maps all possible usernames to all possible userdir directories, whether or not they exist. mod_userdir has more bells and whistles, like restricting which users have a userdir, and alternative userdirs certain users.
Trying to configure apache2 to load example.com/forum/ from a different document root, relative to the site root. Forums are installed somewhere else on the server.
Is there a directory alias command? I've found the alias configuration entry for apache, but had no luck.
Basically, I want example.com to have the same directory its always had, but example.com/forum/ to be hosted somewhere else, on the same server.
I tagged this question with mod_rewrite because I thought maybe it would be the key, here.
Cheers!
Alias is the right way, unless you have some subtlety that you didn't reveal in your question.
# http.conf
Alias /forum /usr/lib/bbs/ # or whatever
The job of Alias is to take the abstract URL coming into your system and map it to a concrete filesystem path. Once it has done that, the request is no longer an URL but a path. If there is no Alias or similar directive handling that URL, then it will get mapped to a conrete path via DocumentRoot.
If this isn't working, you have to debug it further. Are you getting errors when you access /forum? Look in the error log.
It all depends of what you want. You can "hardlink" with real path and it works (so you were right to think it could work with mod_rewrite).
Quick sample (that works on my production domains) to make an internal change (I add a subdirectory):
RewriteRule (.*) %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/mysubfolder%{REQUEST_FILENAME} [QSA,L]
So you can easily do something like:
RewriteRule ^/forum/(.*) %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/mysubfolder%{REQUEST_FILENAME} [QSA,L]
And my suggestion would be that if you plan to have more rewrite rules, keep everything homogeneous, i.e.: keep on using only rewrite rules, so use my suggestion above. This way you'll not get a bad mix of Alias, RewriteRules and so on. For nice and clean stuff: keep everything homogeneous.
I have a domain, for example, http://example.com. It is already configured to point to
/var/www/
Basically, i want http://example.com to point to
/var/www/4.0/
and http://example.com/foobar/ to point to
/var/www/moo/
How can I do this with the httpd.conf file for Apache2? Thanks
Assuming you are only serving one domain (example.com), you can change your DocumentRoot to /var/www/4.0/
and set an Alias for the /foobar like
Alias /foobar /var/www/moo
If you are serving more than one domain from the same Apache, then you need to use the DocumentRoot within a VirtualHost tag.
More info is here: http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/vhosts/
I think you're going about this the wrong way with httpd.conf, but I'll answer your question as you asked it first and then explain about that.
There are two settings in httpd.conf relevant to this.
The DocumentRoot setting is the important one, it configures the base directory from which to serve. Change it as so:
Before:
DocumentRoot "/var/www"
After:
DocumentRoot "/var/www/4.0"
Be sure not to use any / after the 4.0, it's not needed.
A little under 30 lines below this setting is another, which should say:
As the comment above it says, change it to "/var/www/4.0" too.
This would set www.example.com to the 4.0 directory (first part) and apply the relevant settings to this directory too (second part).
But I don't think you should do that, setting apache to serve the 4.0/ directory with httpd.conf makes a mess for serving the other directories. I'd suggest you read about redirects and how to implement them with whatever language you're using. Then you can point one URL to another without it ever being noticed in the browser (unless they're really trying to).
So without changing DocumentRoot from "/var/www", you can edit /var/www/index.php (or whatever) and have it redirect to /var/www/4.0/. The same can be done in /var/www/foobar/index.php to display /var/www/moo/ instead, but here I'd really just rename the "foobar" directory on the server to "moo". If you want to get elaborate, look into mod_rewrite, but I'd advise you to try all your alternatives first and only use it if you really need to, it's quite a complex tool.
I'm starting up a new web-site, and I'm having difficulties enforcing my desired file/folder organization:
For argument's sake, let's say that my website will be hosted at:
http://mywebsite.com/
I'd like (have set up) Apache's Virtual Host to map http://mywebsite.com/ to the /fileserver/mywebsite_com/www folder.
The problem arises when I've decided that I'd like to put a few files (favicon.ico and robots.txt) into a folder that is ABOVE the /www that Apache is mounting the http://mywebsite.com/ into
robots.txt+favicon.ico go into => /fileserver/files/mywebsite_com/stuff
So, when people go to http://mywebsite.com/robots.txt, Apache would be serving them the file from /fileserver/mywebsite_com/stuff/robots.txt
I've tried to setup a redirection via mod_rewrite, but alas:
RewriteRule ^(robots\.txt|favicon\.ico)$ ../stuff/$1 [L]
did me no good, because basically I was telling apache to serve something that is above it's mounted root.
Is it somehow possible to achieve the desired functionality by setting up Apache's (2.2.9) Virtual Hosts differently, or defining a RewriteMap of some kind that would rewrite the URLs in question not into other URLs, but into system file paths instead?
If not, what would be the preffered course of action for the desired organization (if any)?
I know that I can access the before mentioned files via PHP and then stream them - say with readfile(..), but I'd like to have Apache do as much work as necessary - it's bound to be faster than doing I/O through PHP.
Thanks a lot, this has deprived me of hours of constructive work already. Not to mention poor Apache getting restarted every few minutes. Think of the poor Apache :)
It seems you are set to using a RewriteRule. However, I suggest you use an Alias:
Alias /robots.txt /fileserver/files/mywebsite_com/stuff/robots.txt
Additionally, you will have to tell Apache about the restrictions on that file. If you have more than one file treated this way, do it for the complete directory:
<Directory /fileserver/files/mywebsite_com/stuff>
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>
Can you use symlinks?
ln -s /fileserver/files/mywebsite_com/stuff/robots.txt /fileserver/files/mywebsite_com/stuff/favicon.ico /fileserver/mywebsite_com/www/
(ln is like cp, but creates symlinks instead of copies with -s.)