I've installed Ubuntu 10.04 LAMP server. Where do I best create folders to put my websites?

Question

I've installed Ubuntu 10.04 LAMP server. The only (in addition to all the standard technical users created by installation) user is "administrator" (should I create more?). I doubt it is correct to place public websites to /home/administrator/public_html/. What is the correct place? I am going to use Apache's Name-based Virtual Host Support to host multiple websites.

Answer 1

That depends a lot on what you think is good.

Personally i have two lamp's running several sites and they use the following setup:

/var/www/domain.tld/subdomaine
/var/www/domain.tld/subdomaine-log

Real life example:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin hostmaster@sourcelab.dk
    ServerName sourcelab.dk
    ServerAlias www.sourcelab.dk *.sourcelab.dk

    DocumentRoot /var/www/sourcelab.dk/www
    <Directory />
            Options FollowSymLinks
            AllowOverride None
    </Directory>

    <Directory /var/www/sourcelab.dk/www>
            Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
            AllowOverride All
            Order allow,deny
            allow from all
    </Directory>

    ErrorLog /var/www/sourcelab.dk/www-log/error.log

    # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
    # alert, emerg.
    LogLevel warn

    CustomLog /var/www/sourcelab.dk/www-log/access.log combined
    ServerSignature On
</VirtualHost>

If you use this setup it might be a good idea to alter /etc/logrotate.d/apache2 just prepend lines like this "/var/www/sourcelab.dk/www-log/*.log" to the file.

/var/www/sourcelab.dk/www-log/*.log
/var/log/apache2/*.log {
    weekly
    missingok
    rotate 52
    compress
    delaycompress
    notifempty
    create 640 root adm
    sharedscripts
    postrotate
            if [ -f "`. /etc/apache2/envvars ; echo ${APACHE_PID_FILE:-/var/run/apache2.pid}`" ]; then
                    /etc/init.d/apache2 reload > /dev/null
            fi
    endscript
}

This will make logrotate rotate the log-files once a week and keep a backlog of 52 times one week. This will help you avoid filling your HDD with logfiles and it helps you if you ever need something from the logfiles. I recently trawled through a 5GB postfix mail logfile... NOT FUN!