Newbie in packaging web apps

[Filippo Rusconi <lopippo@debian.org>]

Greetings, Fellow Developers,

I set out to package a scientific application that has a web interface
(its name is hekate). It is mainly Perl code, with some javascript for
displaying data in the browser.

I can succesfully install that application according to the webapps
recommendations (/usr/share/<PACKAGE>/www and
/usr/share/<PACKAGE>/cgi-bin, for example). 

I would like that the final user accesses the program with that URL:

http://hekate.localhost

and I could do this if:

1. /etc/hosts has lines like

127.0.0.1     localhost
127.0.0.1     hekate.localhost

2. /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/hekate.conf has the following directives:

<VirtualHost *:80>

   ServerName hekate.localhost
   ServerAdmin root@localhost

   DocumentRoot /usr/share/hekate/www/html

   <Directory />
       Options FollowSymLinks
       AllowOverride None

       <RequireAll>
           # Require all granted
           Require ip 127.0.0.1
       </RequireAll>
   </Directory>

   <Directory /usr/share/hekate/www/html>
       Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
       AllowOverride None

       <RequireAll>
           # Require all granted
           Require ip 127.0.0.1
       </RequireAll>
   </Directory>

   ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/share/hekate/cgi-bin/
   # <Directory "/srv/www/Hekate/cgi-bin">
   <Directory "/usr/share/hekate/cgi-bin">
       AllowOverride None
       Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch

       <RequireAll>
           # Require all granted
           Require ip 127.0.0.1
       </RequireAll>
   </Directory>

So, for the hekate.conf apache2 conf file, that is easy, all I have to
do is ship this in the binary package and install it in the
sites-available directory, then call the a2ensite program to make a
link to the sites-enabled directory (a2dissite when uninstalling the
software).

For the /etc/hosts file, I wonder how I could ensure that there is
effectively a 

127.0.0.1     localhost

line and then add this one:

127.0.0.1     hekate.localhost

Likewise, how could I make sure that the added line is removed upon
uninstalling the software package ?

Am I totally out of track or is this something doable ? Maybe debconf
is my friend ? Or should I go into prerm / postinst scripting ?

Thank your for your time,

Cheers,
Filippo


--
Filippo Rusconi, PhD - public crypto key 7694CF42@ pgp.mit.edu
Researcher at CNRS and Debian Developer <lopippo@debian.org>
Author of ``massXpert''     at http://www.massxpert.org