[ale] Virtual hosting and PHP apps

[Michael B. Trausch]

On 04/14/2011 11:14 AM, David Hillman wrote:
> I am using a Linode VPS to test a couple of Drupal apps using Apache
> virtual hosts.  One of the problems I am having is the files from one
> host is bleeding over into another host; ie, if I put files in host A, I
> can access those files from host B.  What gives?  Is that an Apache
> issue?  If it is, how do I fix it?  I used the instructions from
> Linode's website to set up the virtual hosts with SSL.  I went over the
> files about 5 times each to make sure all the folder names were correct.
>  Is there a document somewhere that lays out the architecture of virtual
> hosting?  I want to be able to trace  what exactly happens when a
> request is made to a specific host.

Tar up the configuration directory (sans the SSL key/cert) and attach
that your reply to this, so that we can see what the configuration is.
If you need to do any sterilization of the configuration, let us know
exactly what was sterilized.

Just a simple "tar cjf apache-config.tar.bz2 /etc/apache2" will work,
though use the --exclude option to omit your SSL key and certificate
(sending those will mean that they would be in the public archive and
thus you would have to consider them compromised).

My guess would be that you have overlapping document roots or somehow or
another you have a configuration stanza that is mapping the same space
into multiple virtual hosts.

> The other issue is finding a good way to deploy Drupal easily to a test
> server and then to a production server, with all of the security and
> database tables in place.  I have heard some people use Ant, spit and
> duct tape.  I have never used Ant much.  On the Windows side, I have
> used msconOn my laptop, I use Turnkey Linux virtual machine devices to
> test locally, so all the setup is done for me there.

You should read "Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through
Build, Test, and Deployment Automation" by Farley, David, Humble, and
Jez.  It is an _AWESOME_ book and will get you thinking hard about your
application's lifecycle and how you get from testing to production.  I
would highly, highly recommend that book.  Highly.

Also, don't fall into the trap that most interpreted-language developers
(particularly Web developers) seem to fall into:  do not assume that a
traditional development stack will not work for you.  Sure, "make all"
might be a no-op in your project, since there won't be anything to
compile (unless you have PHP extensions written in C to speed up your
code base, but since writing extensions for PHP is hairy, that's likely
to not be the case).  But having a normal development harness is a good
thing.  Perhaps instead of compilation you can use "make all" to do
something very simple, like "php -l" on each source file to ensure that
the sources are at least syntactically valid PHP.

Then you could even go so far as to use make to build your deployment
package or whatever.  By using make, you can use "make test".  And that
there is enough to get you to be able to work with a some sort of a
build bot.  From there it's just figuring out what (human) processes
need to be used to get from the successful build on a build bot to
staging to testing to production.

Again, I highly recommend reading Continuous Delivery.  It will give you
_lots_ of ideas.

	--- Mike