Set Up a Single Drupal Installation for Supporting Multiple Virtual Hosts
Do you hate redundancy? So do I! Rather than installing and maintaining Drupal and its modules separately for each virtual host, it's much better to install it once and link each domain to the shared copy. Of course, we still want to maintain high security. This blog entry will walk you through installing Drupal 5.1 on a SuSE 10.0 box.
Let's get right to it:
groupadd drupal groupmod drupal -A wwwrun groupmod drupal -A psaftp groupmod drupal -A psaadm
Create a temporary directory for file uploads:
mkdir /tmp/.drupal chgrp drupal /tmp/.drupal chmod 2775 /tmp/.drupal
Owner must be root and group drupal, otherwise image uploading will fail!
Set Up the Shared Installation
Download and store the Drupal distribution to the shared directory, set up proper owner, group, access, and create a link which will always point to the current Drupal installation:
cd /srv/www mkdir apps cd apps mkdir drupal cd drupal wget http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/drupal/files/projects/drupal-5.x.tar.gz tar -xzvf drupal-5.x.tar.gz chown root.drupal -R drupal-5.x chmod 2775 drupal-5.x/sites ln -s drupal-5.x drupal
Create a short shell script that will set up the required links and file copies in a virtual host:
cat - >drupal_setup_in_httpdocs_dir.sh <<EOF #!/bin/bash # # Install a shared Drupal hosting # # Copy this script to the httpdocs directory of the new site and run it! # # ln -s ../../../apps/drupal/drupal/includes includes ln -s ../../../apps/drupal/drupal/misc misc ln -s ../../../apps/drupal/drupal/modules modules cp -pr ../../../apps/drupal/drupal/profiles profiles cp -pr ../../../apps/drupal/drupal/sites sites ln -s ../../../apps/drupal/drupal/themes themes ln -s ../../../apps/drupal/drupal/cron.php cron.php ln -s ../../../apps/drupal/drupal/index.php index.php ln -s ../../../apps/drupal/drupal/install.php install.php ln -s ../../../apps/drupal/drupal/update.php iupdate.php cp -p ../../../apps/drupal/drupal/.htaccess .htaccess cp -p ../../../apps/drupal/drupal/robots.txt robots.txt chmod 660 sites/default/settings.php chmod 660 .htaccess mkdir files chgrp drupal files chmod 2775 files mkdir files/temp chmod g+w files/temp EOF chmod 700 drupal_setup_in_httpdocs_dir.sh
The strategy here is to use the /srv/www/apps/drupal/drupal symbolic link to point to the currently installed Drupal version. This implies that all of your virtual hosts will use the same version, and that you will upgrade all of them simultaneously. It might be a good idea to build in additional flexibility and create multiple symbolic links, such as /srv/www/apps/drupal/drupal_example.com, so that you can upgrade each host separately; obviously, you'll have to adjust the drupal_setup_in_httpdocs_dir.sh script accordingly.
Set Up a VHost
For each VHost, you need to do the following:
Copy drupal_setup_in_httpdocs_dir.sh (above) to the httpdocs directory and run it to create the necessary links, directories, and files.
Follow the instructions in the Drupal INSTALL.txt file. The names of your databases and your database users are global, so if your domain is called example.com, I recommend calling your database example_com_drupal_db and your database user example_com_drupal. I also recommend to create a sites/example.com directory and to put settings.php there.
Create and activate vhost.conf to allow PHP to access the required files in a safe manner:
cat - >/srv/www/vhosts/example.com/conf/vhost.conf <<EOF # # allow all documents below this dir access to drupal core # <DirectoryMatch "^/srv/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs"> <IfModule sapi_apache2.c> php_admin_flag safe_mode on php_admin_flag safe_mode_gid on php_admin_value open_basedir "/srv/www/apps/drupal:/srv/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs:/tmp" </IfModule> <IfModule mod_php5.c> php_admin_flag safe_mode on php_admin_flag safe_mode_gid on php_admin_value open_basedir "/srv/www/apps/drupal:/srv/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs:/tmp" </IfModule> </DirectoryMatch> # # now limit for all directories below root that are not includes or modules # users want other apps installed too... so no access to drupal # <DirectoryMatch "^(/srv/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs/)(?!includes/|modules/).*/"> <IfModule sapi_apache2.c> php_admin_flag safe_mode on php_admin_flag safe_mode_gid on php_admin_value open_basedir "/srv/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs:/tmp" </IfModule> <IfModule mod_php5.c> php_admin_flag safe_mode on php_admin_flag safe_mode_gid on php_admin_value open_basedir "/srv/www/vhosts/example.com/httpdocs:/tmp" </IfModule> </DirectoryMatch> EOF /usr/local/psa/admin/sbin/websrvmng --reconfigure-vhost --vhost-name=example.com /etc/init.d/apache2 restart
You may also want to enable "clean URLs."
Remember to set the temporary directory to /tmp/.drupal in each Drupal installation!
Conclusion
This procedure should allow you to install Drupal in a safe and shared manner.
See also Create Subthemes to Keep Garland Customizations Separate on a Shared Installation.