Re: Apache and users?

["Tyler Nally" <tnally iquest net>]

I think it's a little more than making a link.

Kevin's right in stating that it's more of a unix thing
than an apache thing.  Actually, it's more of a web server
unix thing.

Normally, if someone has a web server, they'll put a 
directive in one of the setup files that tell which
directory in each of the accounts home directory is
the place where they can build their own WWW tree to put
their pages, etc.  In Apache it should be something like...

  UserDir public_html

---or---

  UserDir www

... this means if someone has an account named "bob" and
they want to publish pages on a web server at "foo.com" all
he has to do (in using the first example) is place web page
stuff in the /home/bob/public_html path and it will be 
referenced by http://www.foo.com/~bob

So, it's not a simple matter of making a link from the persons
home directory to make it show up differently as the pages
are typically one directory farther down in the home directory
than expected.

What you might be able to do... though.... is create an Alias
with the web server setup to point to a directory where you've
created an individual *home* spot for each login.

Alias /users/ "/home/www/"

In the example above you tell Apache that the /home/www directory
will be mapped on the server to "/users/".  Then, it's just a
matter of making sure that everybody that wants a www page at
http://www.foo.com/users/ has their own directory in there.

"bob" would have a /home/www/bob directory
"tammy" would have a /home/www/tammy directory, etc.

These directories would have full read and write permissions for
the users themselves and world readability for the web server.

Another possibility when setting up the login for web server 
access would be to create the /home/www/bob directory at the same
time as the account is created.  At the same time, create a link
from bob's public_html directory to point to the place where files
will truly be placed.

   /home/bob/public_html ---> /home/www/bob

If you do this, then people can surf their own pages via going
to http://www.foo.com/~bob -or- http://www.foo.com/users/bob
either should work properly.

Another possibility would be to create a VirtualServer that seems
to be a different machine.

   http://users.foo.com 

... and have that instance have the default document root location
point to the equivalent of the Alias for /users" (at /home/www/ above).
Then people will be able to have a url like....

   http://users.foo.com/bob

Tyler Nally
-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Colby <kevinc grainsystems com>
To: redhat-install-list redhat com <redhat-install-list redhat com>
Date: Monday, July 12, 1999 5:19 PM
Subject: Re: Apache and users?


>Durham, Kenneth J wrote:
>> 
>> I was wondering if anyone knew if there was a way to remove
>> the ~ before the username when accessing users web pages.
>
>This really has nothing to do with Apache and everything to
>do with unix-style "~"="the user's home directory".
>
>The only way of getting what you want would be to actually
>have those directories in the base web server's home directory.
>One rather cute way of doing that would be to have the home
>for apache actually be /home, but that could make non-user
>web serving (perhaps your main site or other stuff) very messy,
>if not impossible.  If you can dedicate a machine to users'
>pages (users.mydomain.com) then this might be viable, but
>otherwise, I think you're asking for trouble.
>
> - Kevin Colby
>   kevinc grainsystems com
>
>
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