Per-user web directories
On systems with multiple users, each user can be permitted to have a
web site in their home directory using the UserDir directive. Visitors
to a URL http://example.com/~username/ will get content
out of the home directory of the user "username", out of
the subdirectory specified by the UserDir directive.
Note that, by default, access to these directories is not
enabled. You can enable access when using UserDir by uncommenting the line
#Include conf/extra/httpd-userdir.conf
in the default config file conf/httpd.conf, and adapting the httpd-userdir.conf
file as necessary, or by including the appropriate directives in a
Directory block within the main config file.
See also
Per-user web directories
| Related Modules | Related Directives |
|---|---|
Setting the file path with UserDir
The UserDir
directive specifies a directory out of which per-user
content is loaded. This directive may take several different forms.
If a path is given which does not start with a leading slash, it is assumed to be a directory path relative to the home directory of the specified user. Given this configuration:
UserDir public_html
the URL http://example.com/~rbowen/file.html will be
translated to the file path
/home/rbowen/public_html/file.html
If a path is given starting with a slash, a directory path will be constructed using that path, plus the username specified. Given this configuration:
UserDir /var/html
the URL http://example.com/~rbowen/file.html will be
translated to the file path /var/html/rbowen/file.html
If a path is provided which contains an asterisk (*), a path is used in which the asterisk is replaced with the username. Given this configuration:
UserDir /var/www/*/docs
the URL http://example.com/~rbowen/file.html will be
translated to the file path
/var/www/rbowen/docs/file.html
Multiple directories or directory paths can also be set.
UserDir public_html /var/html
For the URL http://example.com/~rbowen/file.html,
Apache will search for ~rbowen. If it isn't found,
Apache will search for rbowen in /var/html. If
found, the above URL will then be translated to the file path
/var/html/rbowen/file.html
Redirecting to external URLs
The UserDir directive can be
used to redirect user directory requests to external URLs.
UserDir http://example.org/users/*/
The above example will redirect a request for
http://example.com/~bob/abc.html to
http://example.org/users/bob/abc.html.
Restricting what users are permitted to use this feature
Using the syntax shown in the UserDir documentation, you can restrict what users are permitted to use this functionality:
UserDir disabled root jro fish
The configuration above will enable the feature for all users
except for those listed in the disabled statement.
You can, likewise, disable the feature for all but a few users by
using a configuration like the following:
UserDir disabled
UserDir enabled rbowen krietz
See UserDir
documentation for additional examples.
Enabling a cgi directory for each user
In order to give each user their own cgi-bin directory, you can use
a <Directory>
directive to make a particular subdirectory of a user's home directory
cgi-enabled.
<Directory /home/*/public_html/cgi-bin/>
Options ExecCGI
SetHandler cgi-script
</Directory>
Then, presuming that UserDir is set to
public_html, a cgi program example.cgi
could be loaded from that directory as:
http://example.com/~rbowen/cgi-bin/example.cgi
Allowing users to alter configuration
If you want to allows users to modify the server configuration in
their web space, they will need to use .htaccess files to
make these changes. Ensure that you have set AllowOverride to a
value sufficient for the directives that you want to permit the users
to modify. See the .htaccess tutorial for
additional details on how this works.