Re: [gentoo-project] Re: [gentoo-dev-announce] New Developer: Michael Orlitzky (mjo)

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 12/05/2013 11:32 AM, Anthony G. Basile wrote:
>
> My student (gentoo dev twitch153) and I are maintaining webapp-config.
> We're both upstream and the ebuild maintainer.
>

Here's a hopefully-short version of our situation. Among other things,
we do web hosting for small businesses. These kinds of places have
neither the expertise nor interest to manage a website on a shared
hosting service, so they pay us a little bit more to do it all for them.

So we're running Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla, etc. as well as a number of
custom sites, and we keep them all up-to-date. Not just the CMSes, but
the plugins and whatever else, too.

For security, I want the sites as isolated as possible. An exploit on
one customer's site shouldn't be able to affect another. For that, we
use mpm-itk and isolate each site under its own
/var/www/${domain}/${host} directory. The temporary directories for PHP
are overridden. Other developers besides me need full write access to
these directories, but the apps themselves only need read/traverse with
write access to an "upload" folder. We use POSIX ACLs to achieve this,
and I've written a utility and patches to make that not suck so
much[1][2][3]. (Someday I dream of getting the apply-default-acl
algorithm upstreamed into libacl so that coreutils et al. could use it.)

Most sites are kind of standard, but there are differences between them.
We do all of the QA after an upgrade, so if I upgrade, say, Wordpress
for www.example.com, I have to run through a bunch of checks to make
sure it still works. That can take maybe an hour. Since the upgrades do
break things occasionally, we have to do them one-at-a-time; otherwise,
20 sites would be broken while we QA the first one. The same goes for
the plugins/modules.

So basically, every website needs its own copy of the web app and has
its own set of permissions. I don't doubt that webapp-config could be
made to do this, but I'm sceptical that the result would be less complex
than "everybody gets their own copy" and a makefile to set the
permissions. Space isn't an issue, so de-duping the apps isn't a huge
gain for us. I would love to be proven wrong though!

On the other hand, dependency management is critical, and greatly
simplifies the job of me not accidentally breaking something. I need to
be sure that if a php USE flag gets unset by default, and
www.example.com relies on it, that I don't unwittingly update and break
the site. Simply copying the webapp ebuilds and deleting SRC_URI is a
huge gain for little investment.



[1]
https://michael.orlitzky.com/articles/problems_with_posix_acls_and_common_utilities.php

[2]
https://michael.orlitzky.com/articles/fixing_posix_acls_in_common_utilities.php

[3] https://michael.orlitzky.com/code/apply-default-acl.php