Re: [gentoo-dev] Web Application installations

[Don Seiler]

Very interesting idea.  Is there a sort of web-app herd?  What about
having a net-webapp category?  Anyway I definitely want to stay apprised
of any changes in this area.

Thanks,
Don.

On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 01:31:52AM -0700, Robin H.Johnson wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 04:17:40PM +1000, Andrew Cowie wrote:
> > On Wed, 2003-07-23 at 15:17, Max Kalika wrote:
> > > I've ported over most of the Horde apps to use this eclass in my
> > > local tree as an exercise and let me tell you, installing (and
> > > upgrading) Horde is actually pleasant now.
> > Oh, yeah, I can see that. The app I have in mind is dotProject (also a
> > PHP web app)
> >
> > Web Application installations ARE a bit more complex than just `make
> > install` the program:
> >
> > a) installing  PHP app (ok, this is relatively straight forward - you
> > just unpack  tarball somewhere and ta-da, but one *does* need to know
> > where to put it)
> > "Where to put it" does have slightly broader implications. Under the
> > machine's default DocumentRoot seems a good idea, but there are many
> > instances where one wants to make a separate virtual host for the
> > installation, or, or....
> > Certainly as a first approximation, "sub directory of machine default
> > DocRoot" seems a not bad place to start, but I'm curious what others
> > think we should practice as I can think of numerous objections to this.
> After the 1.4 release (maybe before, depending on how busy I am with
> work), there will be a migration of all web applications to install
> somewhere like /usr/share/webapp/${P} (maybe ${PF})
>
> You will then be able to create instances of the package by having that
> /usr/share/webapp/${P} in PHP's include path, and all you do is have the
> configuration files in your instance directory, enabling you to have as
> many instances as you want, securely, with only one set of main files,
> even accross virtual hosts.
>
> Config files probably be in /etc/webapp/${P} which will be symlinked to
> from wherever you have the instance. This is to protect them, but I am
> not 100% if this will be needed with the instances.
>
> > b) ensure you've got all the dependencies. (Yuk).
> Easy with Gentoo. RDEPEND=... for most webapps.
>
> > c) configure application [not so optional, but in Gentoo you are
> > expected to do this on your own; also applies to:]
> see what the phpMyAdmin ebuild does for making this REALLY good.
>
> > d) install DB tables [optional, depends on which DB you're running, etc,
> > etc... could guess from USE flags, but who wants an app just madly
> > crashing around creating tables, especially when config may not be in
> > place and when, if an upgrade, tables all ready exist]
> Again, see the phpMyAdmin ebuild.
>
> > Is there a way that that can be automated too? I suspect not, without
> > going to something like linux-control-center or debconf or some similar
> > craziness]
> I don't know if you have played with zope-config, but expect something
> like that for the web application setup.
>
> --
> Robin Hugh Johnson
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