Running eZ Publish daemons in shared virtual hosting environment
Wednesday 16 March 2011 3:51:46 am
Situation and demands
Situation
- A server in a virtual hosting (chroot) environment with many eZP installations on different user accounts (each for a different client),
- No direct access to the root user
Demands
- Only one Solr server and only one OpenOffice conversion server instance for all eZP installations,
- Start both servers as daemons at boot time,
- Being able to start/stop/restart the daemons,
- Don't run daemons as root (for security reasons),
- Being able to read and reset daemons' log files
The idea
In order for this to work we have to run the OpenOffice conversion server as a user which has access to all the eZP installations, and write access to their "var" folders - this is because the OpenOffice conversion server writes the converted file inside the "var" folder of the eZP instance that requested the conversion. So the idea goes like this:
- Run daemons under the user of the web server (e.g. www, nobody, apache) - it is the only one that for sure has access to all the eZP installations . Also the www user is usually restricted enough to avoid security issues
- Have another user for starting/stopping daemons
- For each daemon create a startup script to start as www user or stop it