I am currently hosting a simple multi-tenancy service on cPanel shared hosting, where customers who signed up will have a subdomain, directory and a database dynamically assigned to them (via XMLAPI):
Customer A subdomain directory7: /home/xxx/public_html/customers/custA/ (http://custA.abc.com
),
Customer B subdomain directory: /home/xxx/public_html/customers/custB/ (http://custB.abc.com
) etc.
All customers will be served with the same copy of the system files (except for their respective config file), so I created symlinks from my customers' subdomain directory to: /home/xxx/mainfiles/
However, I was greeted with PHP warnings as follows:
[17-Dec-2014 07:28:39 Europe/London] PHP Warning: Unknown: open_basedir restriction in effect. File(/home/xxx/mainfiles/index.php) is not within the allowed path(s): (/home/xxx/public_html/customers/custA:/usr/lib/php:/usr/php4/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php:/usr/local/php4/lib/php:/tmp) in Unknown on line 0
[17-Dec-2014 07:28:39 Europe/London] PHP Warning: Unknown: failed to open stream: Operation not permitted in Unknown on line 0
[17-Dec-2014 07:28:39 Europe/London] PHP Fatal error: Unknown: Failed opening required '/home/xxx/public_html/customers/custA/index.php' (include_path='.:/opt/alt/php54/usr/share/pear:/opt/alt/php54/usr/share/php') in Unknown on line 0
Therefore, I will need to call my web hosting company every single time I have a new customer signing up, to turn off this particular open_basedir parameter for the new customer's subdomain/directory.
The hosting company told me that the open_basedir parameter is configured per subdomain/directory, but cannot be configured per directory path (i.e. /home/xxx/mainfiles).
Are there any better way of doing this? Like using .htaccess or something...
My aims are:
- System files must be secure, not directly accessible by users but only via subdomain calls - Thus I store it one level ABOVE public_html
- I want to have a common folder where all my customer's subdomain directory will point to - So in the future I only need to do once changes for all customers
- Customers can access the system upon successful sign-up
- Remains to host in shared server hosting - Serving only small system file
.htaccess
, you should be able to allow your custom path to theopen_basedir
through an .htaccess file. – Sree Dec 17 '14 at 10:53