Multiple Blogs on Debian Etch

Wayfarer — Sat, 30 Jun 2007 02:39:08 +0000

I’ve been having problems with theming multiple blogs on WordPress using the default Debian Etch settings. Those problems are gone, as of today. Here’s how I fixed the blog.

The setup I wanted was as follows:

blog.aeolis.org goes to the main system blog.
name.blogs.aeolis.org goes to an individual’s blog.
blogs.aeolis.org by itself gets punted to the main system blog.

One note about the way things are installed on my server: I put all the blog sites in the /srv/www hierarchy, with each unique hostname getting a separate directory. For example, ‘blog.aeolis.org’ would be located in ‘/srv/www/blog.aeolis.org’.

The first thing I did was to create a new site definition for WordPress:

/etc/apache2/sites-available/wordpress



# WordPress blog setup.

#

# Wayfarer 

#

# Blog software should be in /srv/www/blog.aeolis.org (or linked from there).

# Address of blogs.aeolis.org gets redirected to blog.aeolis.org.

# URLs of form:  .blogs.aeolis.org get separate blogs.

 



        

                UseCanonicalName        Off

                ServerName              blog.aeolis.org

                ServerAlias             blogs.aeolis.org *.blogs.aeolis.org

 

                VirtualDocumentRoot     /srv/www/%0

                Options                 All

 

                ErrorLog /var/log/apache2/error-blog.aeolis.org.log

                LogFormat "%V %h %l %u %t \"%r\" %s %b" vcommon

                CustomLog /var/log/apache2/access-blog.aeolis.org.log vcommon

I made a point of making this the last set of hostnames considered for the virtual hosting system by creating a symlink in /etc/apache2/sites-enabled that was at the very end of the alphabet.

ln -s ../sites-available/wordpress /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/zzz-wordpress

Then I force-reloaded Apache.

/etc/init.d/apache2 force-reload

After that, I ran the setup script, as recommended by the README.Debian file.

sh /usr/share/doc/wordpress/examples/setup-mysql -u wp-aeolis blog.aeolis.org

Here’s where I ran into trouble. Because the setup script simply symlinks the blog’s directory under /srv/www to /usr/share/wordpress, a user can’t generally write to important places like the .htaccess file (for pretty permalinks) or the wp-content directory (for themes and plugins and such). Furthermore, even if I symlinked the contents of /usr/share/wordpress into the user’s directory, the wp-config.php script would still be pointing at /usr/share/wordpress for those resources. Therefore, I needed to change some things around.

I started by hacking the global wp-config.php to point directly to the requested blog’s path under /srv/www.

/etc/wordpress/wp-config.php




/** WordPress's Debianised default master config file

Please do NOT edit and read about how the configuration works in the README.Debian

**/

 

require_once('/etc/wordpress/config-'.strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']).'.php');

 

define('ABSPATH', '/srv/www/' . strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']) . '/');

 

require_once(ABSPATH.'wp-settings.php');

?>

See what I did? I changed the ABSPATH to reflect the particular host whose blog is being requested. I figure that since the WordPress installation is already aware of individual host configuration files (/etc/wordpress/config-hostname.php), it won’t be too dangerous to make it aware of individual WordPress directories. I probably should make it default to /usr/share/wordpress/ if the directory doesn’t exist, but that’s for round 2.

With that out of the way, I was free to play with some symlinks. I removed /srv/www/blog.aeolis.org (a link to /usr/share/wordpress), and created an actual directory there. I then changed into that directory and ran the following script.

The Script of Doom



#!/bin/bash

#

# WordPress directory prep.

#

# Wayfarer 

#

# Meant to be run in the directory you want WordPress installed to.

 

WP_DIR=/usr/share/wordpress

INST_DIR=.

 

ln -vs ${WP_DIR}/* ${INST_DIR}

 

# Create user-customizable wp-content directory.

rm -f ${INST_DIR}/wp-content

for d in themes plugins; do

        mkdir -p ${INST_DIR}/wp-content/${d}

        ln -vs ${WP_DIR}/wp-content/${d}/* ${INST_DIR}/wp-content/${d}

        chown www-data:www-data ${INST_DIR}/wp-content/${d}

        chmod 0775 ${INST_DIR}/wp-content/${d}

done

ln -vs ${WP_DIR}/wp-content/index.php ${INST_DIR}/wp-content/index.php

chown www-data:www-data ${INST_DIR}/wp-content

chmod 0775 ${INST_DIR}/wp-content

 

# Create uploads directory.

mkdir -p ${INST_DIR}/wp-content/uploads

chown www-data:www-data ${INST_DIR}/wp-content/uploads

chmod 0775 ${INST_DIR}/wp-content/uploads

 

# Create user-customizable .htaccess file.

rm -f ${INST_DIR}/.htaccess

cp ${WP_DIR}/.htaccess ${INST_DIR}/.htaccess

chown www-data:www-data ${INST_DIR}/.htaccess

chmod 0664 ${INST_DIR}/.htaccess

Still very alpha in nature, but you get the gist. The script symlinks each item in /usr/share/wordpress to the current directory. The wp-content subdirectory gets special treatment, as the themes and plugins subdirectories absolutely must be user- (and probably group-) writable. And, of course, I fixed up .htaccess so that the admin script can edit it for permalinking.

The result? The admin interface is able to edit files, my plugins work, and I stop losing hair wondering why .htaccess can’t be edited even if it’s world-writable.

Hello World!

Wayfarer — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 10:13:47 +0000

After a five-year hiatus, the Constellation is back online!

Currently, we’re working on customizing WordPress. Watch this space, and watch the skies!

Skywatching

Multiple Blogs on Debian Etch

Hello World!