Installing SuPHP

[majdi]

Hi,

I recently installed ubuntu 10.04 LTS Desktop. I will be using this install as a web development environment, so I installed LAMP and phpMyAdmin using the following;

$ sudo apt-get install lamp-server^
$ sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-auth-mysql phpmyadmin

Tested apache, mysql, php and phpMyAdmin and all was working fine until I installed suphp using the following;

$ sudo apt-get install libapache2-mod-suphp

After the suphp install, I disabled mod_php5 using the following;

$ a2dismod php5

Then I enabled suphp globally for Apache by editing /etc/apache2/apache2.conf and adding the following at the end of the file;

# Enable SuPHP
suPHP_Engine on
suPHP_AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php

Then restarted apache using the following;

$ /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Apache is working, but I think the suphp install broke php. When I run my php test script using the following in a text file named testing.php placed in the root folder /var/www;

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

I get a 500 Internal Server Error, but php was running fine before the suphp install.

Anyone got this working or can help me fix this, please do.

[Ryan Dwyer]

The libapache2-mod-suphp package doesn't conflict with PHP, so I'd say you need to have PHP enabled. In fact, it depends on suphp-common which depends on either php4-cgi or php5-cgi.

Enable mod_php5, restart Apache, try again, and if you still get a server error check your error log (/var/log/apache2/error.log).

[majdi]

Thanks Ryan,

I enabled php5 using;

$ a2enmod php5

Now the LAMP install seems to be working fine, but suphp dose not seem to be working.

Any idea?

[Ryan Dwyer]

I've never used it, so unfortunately I can't help you there.

Read through some of the documentation here (http://www.suphp.org/DocumentationVi...apache/INSTALL) about configuring. If you're still having problems check Apache's error log at /var/log/apache2/error.log.

[majdi]

Thanks again Ryan,

The suphp installation notes say;

Please note that mod_suphp was developped for Apache 1.3.2x and Apache
2.0.x. It might not work with other version.

But I'm running Apache/2.2.14 (Ubuntu). Any other solution or alternative mod that can do the same job?

Anyone???

[Ryan Dwyer]

If the purpose of this is to allow your webserver to run scripts with elevated privileges, you can set that in your /etc/sudoers file. You can tell it to only run certain commands as root so it's much better than giving it full access.

If that's the sort of setup you want I can get you the information I used in /etc/sudoers so you can change it to your needs.

[majdi]

Thanks again Ryan,

Yes that is the idea, because I will be running a CMS which runs PHP scripts and when installed in ver/www the owner and group is root, so the CMS is not able to run the scripts due to the permissions issue. I know suphp will solve this problem, but cant get it to work.

It sounds like your solution is a better option, never attempted such an option, so I will need help in configuring it.

Thanks again.

[Ryan Dwyer]

In that case I recommend setting the group to www-data on all your files in /var/www, then giving group write access.

chgrp -R www-data /var/www
chmod -R g+w /var/www

Your CMS should then have full write access to the /var/www folder.

[majdi]

Thanks Ryan,

That worked just fine. Is there a way I can make these setting permanent for any files/folders added to /var/www?

[Ryan Dwyer]

Any new files and folders added by www-data will have the user set to itself so it will be able to write to those files fine. If you make a new file there yourself you will need to chgrp/chmod it.