The mindless ramblings of a bow shooting network engineer.
Apache and User Directories

Apache and User Directories

When I’m developing websites, I usually run a test website in  a user directory on one of my web servers instead of setting up a new virtual host under the main web server. There are a couple of reasons for this, the main one is I don’t have to change anything in my httpd.conf. The web server is already set up with the right config to allow content in user directories, so all I have to do is create a new user.

The one thing I always struggle with, is the correct permissions on the public_html folder in the user directory. I can never seem to remember the correct process, if you add to this all the complications of SELinux, I always end up googling the solution. There are plenty of good articles out there on the internet already, but I can never seem to find them when I need them. That’s why I decided to write this post…

As I already said, my apache servers are usually already set up to server content from user home directories, but I’ve included the steps here for completeness.

Edit the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf file and find the UserDir section.

  1. Comment out the UserDir disabled line
  2. Uncomment the ‘UserDir public_html’ line.
  3. Also uncomment the whole ‘<Directory /home/*/public_html>’ section until the ‘</Directory>’.

When you’re finished, your httpd.conf should look like the one below:

 # UserDir disabled

 # To enable requests to /~user/ to serve the user's public_html
 # directory, remove the "UserDir disabled" line above, and uncomment
 # the following line instead:
 
 UserDir public_html

 <Directory /home/*/public_html>
    Options FollowSymLinks
    AllowOverride FileInfo
 </Directory>

Now we need to make sure we have the correct permissions on the users home area. Let’s make sure the home area is only readable by the owner.

 # chmod 711 ~<username>

Now we’ll give apache the correct rights to read the users public_html folder.

# chmod 755 -R ~<username>/public_html/

Last of all we need to take care of SELinux to make sure apache can actually get the files from the user home directories.

# chmod 755 -R ~<username>/public_html/
# chcon -R -t httpd_sys_content_t ~<username>/public_html

If you made changes to the httpd.conf file, restart your web server.

#service httpd restart

That’s it, apache should now server pages from your user public_html folder.

I hope this saves you some of the headaches I’ve experience setting this stuff up…

 

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