Adventures with Virtual hosts and CGI on Apache 2.2 (Shallow Thoughts)

Adventures with Virtual hosts and CGI on Apache 2.2

We had a server that was still running Debian Etch -- for which Debian just dropped support. We would have upgraded that machine to Lenny long ago except for one impediment: upgrading the live web server from apache 1 to apache 2.2.

Installing etch's apache 2.2.3 package and getting the website running under it was no problem. Debian has vastly improved their apache2 setup from years past -- for instance, installing PHP also enables it now, so you don't need to track down all the places it needs to be turned on.

But when we upgraded to Lenny and its apache 2.2.9, things broke. Getting it working again was tricky because most of the documentation is standard Apache documentation, not based on Debian's more complex setup. Here are the solutions we found.

Enabling virtual hosts

As soon as the new apache 2.2.9 was running, we lost all our websites, because the virtual hosts that had worked fine on Etch broke under Lenny's 2.2.9. Plus, every restart complained [warn] NameVirtualHost *:80 has no VirtualHosts.

All the web documentation said that we had to change the <VirtualHost *> lines to <VirtualHost *:80>. But that didn't help. Most documentation also said we would also need the line: NameVirtualHost *:80 Usually people seemed to find it worked best to put that in a newly created file called conf.d/virtualhosts. Our Lenny upgrade had already created that line and put it in ports.conf, but it didn't work either there or in conf.d/virtualhosts.

It turned out the key was to remove the NameVirtualHost *:80 line from ports.conf, and add it in sites-available/default. Removing it from ports was the important step: if it was in ports.conf at all, then it didn't matter if it was also in the default virtual host.

Enabling CGI scripts

Another problem to track down: CGI scripts had stopped working. I knew about Options +ExecCGI, but adding it wasn't helping. Turned out it also needed an AddHandler, which I don't remember having to add in recent versions on Ubuntu. I added this in the relevant virtual host file in sites-available:

  <Directory />
    AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
    Options ExecCGI
  </Directory>

Enabling .htaccess

We have one enduring mystery: .htaccess files work without needing a line like AllowOverride FileInfo anywhere. I've needed to add that directive in Ubuntu-based apache2 installations, but Lenny seems to allow .htaccess without any override for it. I'm still not sure why it works. It's not supposed to. But hey, without a few mysteries, computers would be boring, right?

Tags: web, apache, debian
[ 21:46 Jul 05, 2010    More tech/web | permalink to this entry | ]