Question

I am running a system similar to SourceForge, where I have a large number of users collaborating on various projects in my systerm. My users are all tucked away comfortably in a chroot jail. However, I'd like them to be able to install TWikis in their project homepage directories (of course). So, as an experiment, when the first project moved in and took up residence, I went ahead and set up a TWiki install for them. Everything was pretty easy, except for one small problem. Because Apache is running from outside the jail, it needs to know the full non-chrooted path for $pubDir, $templateDir, and $dataDir. This isn't such a big deal when I'm doing the install, since I know the full path, but if some poor, unsuspecting user was trying to do his or her own TWiki install, this could be a huge headache!

Is there any correct way to handle this so that my users don't need any knowledge of the topography outside of their jail to get TWiki to work?

Thanks for your time!

• TWiki version: 01 Feb 2003
• Perl version: 5.6.1
• Web server & version: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) (Red-Hat/Linux)
• Server OS: Linux 2.4.18-27.7.x
• Web browser & version: All
• Client OS: All

-- TessSnider - 23 Jun 2003

Answer

I'm no expert (hardly even a novice) in Apache setup, but here's a question: Could you perhaps set the users' common path as a variable and then build the $nnnDir paths based on that? I wonder if it is possible to have a little string manipulation inside the Apache configuration that would help you out.

-- TorbenGB - 24 Jun 2003