Re: web server for development
On Thu, Jan 09, 2020 at 06:16:51AM +0000, Russell L. Harris wrote:
> For development of a web pages, I installed Apache2 on another machine
> in the LAN so that I can FTP web pages from the development machine to
> the web server and view the pages from the development machine.
>
> But the installation of Apache2 on Buster serves documents from
> /var/www/html/, which is owned by root, so as a normal user I cannot
> FTP into that directory.
>
> The web server is not exposed outside the LAN, so security is not an
> issue.
>
> What is the proper approach?
There is no single "proper" approach. There are many approaches that
will work. However, there are some steps you have to take first.
Step one: stop using FTP.
Step two: SERIOUSLY. STOP USING FTP.
Step three: I REALLY REALLY MEAN IT. IF YOU KEEP USING FTP, WE'RE DONE.
Approach one: You could just install apache2 on the development machine.
There's really no need to transfer the content to a second host, just
to bounce it back to the original host via HTTP. Point the apache
configs at wherever your in-development content resides.
(For this approach and for all the other approaches, it doesn't *have*
to be apache2. You could use nginx, or lighttpd, or any other web
server.)
Approach two: You could configure the web server on the second machine
to serve your content via a virtual host that's rooted somewhere other
than /var/www/html. Then rsync your content to that location, using
whatever user account you've configured to have write access to that
location.
Approach three: You could give your user account ownership of, or
group write access to, /var/www/html on the second machine and rsync
your content there, if you are not using virtual hosts for some reason.
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