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.
- Comment out the UserDir disabled line
- Uncomment the ‘UserDir public_html’ line.
- 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…