[lug] sudoers limitations?

[Jeff Schroeder]

Dave asked:

> Is there any other way to do this besides having him host his wiki in
> /home/dude/www/?  I have never looked into configuring apache to
> look in user www directories, although I have heard that this is
> preferable to the /var/www route.  

I think the solution here is to set up your web sites to use accounts 
in, say, /home.  If you have three sites on your machine: you, me, and 
dude, then you might have:

/home/you/www
/home/me/www
/home/dude/www

I'm a fan of name-based virtual hosting, so you'd then have something 
like this in your httpd.conf file:

NameVirtualHost 192.168.1.100

<VirtualHost you.com>
  ServerName you.com
  DocumentRoot /home/you/www
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost me.com>
  ServerName me.com
  DocumentRoot /home/me/www
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost dude.com>
  ServerName dude.com
  DocumentRoot /home/dude/www
</VirtualHost>

Add other options to each host as needed.  Of course you'll need to make 
sure Apache understands what you.com, me.com, and dude.com are; I 
usually just put entries into my /etc/hosts file:

192.168.1.100 you.com
192.168.1.100 me.com
192.168.1.100 dude.com

Finally, I assume your Apache is running as the user "nobody" or 
"www" (a good idea, and probably the default).  You can chmod the /home 
directories so that the user can edit the files, Apache can read them, 
and no other user can see them:

chmod 705 /home/*

This assumes all users are in the "users" group, which is different from 
the "nobody" or "www" group.  You've made the directories read-write 
for the users, readable to the world, but *not* accessible to anyone 
else in the "users" group.

There may be ways to improve this setup, but I've been using it for 
years with great success.

HTH,
Jeff