Location and linking of sites in ISPConfig3

[eugenesan]

Hi,

I am trying to understand the need for so complex and un-natural way of managing location of sites and their linking.

Can anyone explain that?

Why not just locate sites in /$prefix/$client_name/$site_url ?

[till]

The sites are linked in a absolutely natural way there is a directory for every client which contains directorys for every website. The directorys must be named with ID's and not names to prevent problems when a client or website is renamed. To make the navigation on the shell esaier, the system creates symlinks so that sites can be accessed by its name as well.

[eugenesan]

Hi,

Never thought that someone would insist to preserve his system ids when site renamed...
Anyways, links maybe are easy to navigate for a user, but adds bunch of problems since every service should be dealing with soft links instead of real locations. In addition chroot and other security related tasks may become very difficult to implement due to symlinking.
There is even a confusion in one single apache vhosts file.

Can you please specify what modules/plugins are actually affected by that behavior? I am thinking of making that behavior as optional.

BTW: Don't bite me if I am expressing new and maybe extremal ideas :-) I just want ISPC to suit my (and hopely other's) needs.

[till]

All services are using the real directories and apache is able to work fine with symlinks, so there is no such problem.

I am thinking of making that behavior as optional.

The current behaviour should be the default behaviour and not an optional behaviour! You might add another behaviour as optional if you like. But the current behaviour will stay the default, it is the result of different approaches tested in the last 8 years and has been discussed by the ISPConfig developers before the plugins were written and thats what we agreed on.

Can you please specify what modules/plugins are actually affected by that behavior?

All Plugins in the server part and the website module in the frontend.

[eugenesan]

Hi,

Sure, I never meant to change default behavior, an idea was to allow setup without linking for some environments.

Well, I'll have to deal with that lately and alone :-)

[till]

I dont see any problems with supporting an additional layout as long as it is configurable in the server settings in ISPConfig.