web-applications

Ubuntu Apache2 – run VHOST as different user

There are several reasons why you might want to run different Apache Virtual Hosts as separate users from the Apache user account. My most frequent usage is on my development machine to allow running from my home directory. The most commonly recommended option for this purpose is MPM-ITK (a quick hack would be to add yourself to the www-data group using "sudo usermod -a -G www-data USERNAME") sudo apt-get install apache2-mpm-itk sudo a2enmod mpm_itk Modify the virtual host config file in /etc/apache2/sites-available <Virtualhost *:80> ServerName HOSTNAME ServerAdmin webmaster@domain.com <ifmodule mpm_itk_module> AssignUserID USERNAME GROUPNAME </ifmodule> DocumentRoot /home/USERNAME/www/docs ErrorLog /home/USERNAME/www/logs/error.log CustomLog /home/USERNAME/www/logs/access.log combined </Virtualhost> PLEASE NOTE: If you doing this on a machine that already had a default install where MPM-PREFORK is enabled you have to disable sudo a2dismod mpm_prefork sudo a2enmod mpm_itk

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Webserver and database combination on Raspberry Pi

My normal combination on the big-server side would be Apache + MySQL (or PostgreSQL), but on the RPi this seems to be absolute overkill. For data-logging operations I would not use the local system anyway (looking at MQTT as well as Remote MongoDB datastore via REST Webservices). After some poking around and reading up on the options I decided to go for the following combo: LightHTTPD + SQLite. Both are lightweight replacement of their fully-featured big-server counterparts (Apache HTTP & MySQL) and have very familiar configurations. There would be other options that have even less resource usage, but I really don't have the time to start from scratch somewhere. Another reason to go for this combination is that these are very well supported systems with regular security audits. Even though I am not planning to use my RPi's for anything mission-critical this is always worth a consideration as you don't need to unnecessarily introduce vulnerabilities to your network. Install & configure LightHTTPD sudo apt-get install lighttpd php5 php5-cgi php5-sqlite sudo lighty-enable-mod fastcgi sudo lighty-enable-mod fastcgi-php Further config changes can be also made via the config file. sudo vim /etc/lighttpd/lighttpd.conf sudo service lighttpd force-reload Install & configure SQLite sudo apt-get install sqlite3 sqlite3 /home/username/database_name.db All other commands are standard SQL from the 'sqlite>' command prompt or via SQL scripts like sqlite3 /home/username/database_name.db < sql_script.sql Access Databases from the webserver (using PHP) < ?php $db = new SQLite3('mysqlitedb.db'); $results = $db->query('SELECT bar FROM foo'); while ($row = $results->fetchArray()) { var_dump($row); } ?>…

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