Question

After hours of trying to setup subdomains on my dedicated root server, I’m asking you for help.

Target:

• being able to create and access subdomains
• setup an own subdomain for mercurial repositories, using hgweb

Information about the server:

• Debian Linux, Kernel 2.6.32-028stab094.3
• Apache/2.2.16 (Debian)
• Mercurial 1.6.4
• libapache2-mod-wsgi-py3 installed

First question: what is wrong with my apache configuration that I can’t access my subdomains via the browser?

Actually, I can access the root domain and the sites which are installed there.

My configuration:
/etc/apache2/sites-available/default

<VirtualHost *>
    ServerAdmin webmaster@localhost
    ServerName mydomain.tld
    ServerAlias www.mydomain.tld

    DocumentRoot /var/www/forum
    <Directory />
            Options FollowSymLinks
            AllowOverride None
    </Directory>
    <Directory /var/www/forum>
            Options Indexes FollowSymLinks MultiViews
            AllowOverride None
            Order allow,deny
            allow from all
    </Directory>

    ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ /usr/lib/cgi-bin/
    <Directory "/usr/lib/cgi-bin">
            AllowOverride None
            Options +ExecCGI -MultiViews +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
            Order allow,deny
            Allow from all
    </Directory>

    ErrorLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/error.log

    # Possible values include: debug, info, notice, warn, error, crit,
    # alert, emerg.
    LogLevel warn

    CustomLog ${APACHE_LOG_DIR}/access.log combined

    Alias /doc/ "/usr/share/doc/"
    <Directory "/usr/share/doc/">
        Options Indexes MultiViews FollowSymLinks
        AllowOverride None
        Order deny,allow
        Deny from all
        Allow from 127.0.0.0/255.0.0.0 ::1/128
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

/etc/apache2/sites-available/hgrepos.domainname.tld

<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName hgrepos.domainname.tld
    ServerAlias www.hgrepos.domainname.tld
    DocumentRoot /var/www/hgrepos/htdocs

    # WSGIScriptAliasMatch ^(.*)$ /var/www/hgrepos/cgi-bin/hgweb.wsgi$1
    WSGIScriptAlias / /var/www/hgrepos/cgi-bin/hgweb.wsgi

    # To enable "daemon" mode, uncomment following lines. (Read mod_wsgi docs for more info)
    # WSGIDaemonProcess hgrepos.domainname.tld user=USER group=GROUP threads=1 processes=15 maximum-requests=1000
    WSGIDaemonProcess hgrepos.domainname.tld  threads=1 processes=15 maximum-requests=1000
    # some more interesting options (tested on mod_wsgi 2.0):
    # umask=0007 display-name=wsgi-hg.example.net inactivity-timeout=300
    # WSGIProcessGroup hg.example.net

    <Directory /var/www/hgrepos/htdocs>
        Options FollowSymlinks
        DirectoryIndex index.html

        AllowOverride None
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>

    <Directory /var/www/hgrepos/cgi-bin>
        Options ExecCGI FollowSymlinks

        AddHandler wsgi-script .wsgi

        AllowOverride None
        Order allow,deny
        Allow from all
    </Directory>
</VirtualHost>

My /etc/apache2/httpd.conf file is empty.

I enabled the subdomain file via a2ensite subdomain.domainname.tld.

regine@diddi:/etc/apache2/sites-available# ll ../sites-enabled/
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 26 Oct 29 22:33 000-default -> ../sites-available/default
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 48 Nov 17 00:41 hgrepos.domainname.tld -> ../sites-available/hgrepos.domainname.tld

I used both, /etc/init.d/apache2 reload and /etc/init.d/apache2 restart. Apache didn’t tell me that I tried to load a malformed configuration.

The sites for the root domain are under /var/www/forum and accessible.

My folder structure for /var/www/hgrepos looks like:

hgrepos
+- drwxr-xr-x www-data www-data cgi-bin
|--- -rwxr-xr-x www-data www-data hgweb.config
|--- -rwxr-xr-x www-data www-data hgweb.wsgi
+-- drwxr-xr-x htdocs
|--- -rw-r--r-- www-data www-data index.html
|--- drwxr-xr-x www-data www-data myFirstHgRep

The index.html file just contains some Hello World! html to see if the subdomain is accessible.

So now back to my first question: why can’t I access to the hgrepos subdomain via my browser?

Now second, I want to serve some mercurial (hg) repositories for my private projects, using hgweb. I followed those instructions:
https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/modwsgi
https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/HgWebDirStepByStepFtpOnly

Here are my config files under /var/www/hgrepos/cgi-bin/:

hgweb.wsgi

#!/usr/bin/env python
#
# An example hgweb CGI script, edit as necessary
# See also https://www.mercurial-scm.org/wiki/PublishingRepositories

# Path to repo or hgweb config to serve (see 'hg help hgweb')
# config = "hgweb.config"

# Uncomment and adjust if Mercurial is not installed system-wide:
#import sys; sys.path.insert(0, "/path/to/python/lib")

# Uncomment to send python tracebacks to the browser if an error occurs:
import cgitb; cgitb.enable()

from mercurial import demandimport; demandimport.enable()
from mercurial.hgweb import hgweb, wsgicgi
application = hgweb("hgweb.config")
#wsgicgi.launch(application)

hgweb.config

[web]
style = coal
baseurl =

[paths]
/ = /var/www/hgrepos/htdocs/*

Rights of the files:

regine@diddi:/var/www/hgrepos/cgi-bin# ll 
-rwxr-xr-x 1 www-data www-data  68 Nov 17 01:16 hgweb.config
-rwxr-xr-x 1 www-data www-data 621 Nov 17 01:24 hgweb.wsgi

So now my second question: how can I get hgweb working? What’s actually wrong with my configuration?

Well, wow, this is much of text, but I’m not quite sure which information are needed and which aren’t. Hope you can help me, any hint is helpful 🙂

Answer 1

Well, good news – I fixed my issues.

First step was removing libapache-mod-wsgi-py3 and installing libapache-mod-wsgi (during my tries I re-installed wsgi-py3-package several times, seems like my last re-installation fixed that somehow…)

apt-get remove libapache2-mod-wsgi-py3
apt-get install libapach2-mod-wsgi-py3
apt-get autoremove

After that, restarting apache got me the following in my error.log:

mod_wsgi (pid=16349): Target WSGI script '/var/www/hgrepos/cgi-bin/hgweb.wsgi' cannot be loaded as Python module.
mod_wsgi (pid=16349): Exception occurred processing WSGI script '/var/www/hgrepos/cgi-bin/hgweb.wsgi'.
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/var/www/hgrepos/cgi-bin/hgweb.wsgi", line 20, in <module>
    application = hgweb("/var/www/hgrepos/cgi-bin/hgweb.config")
  File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/mercurial/hgweb/hgweb_mod.py", line 32, in __init__
    self.repo = hg.repository(u, repo)
  File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/mercurial/hg.py", line 94, in repository
    repo = _lookup(path).instance(ui, path, create)
  File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/mercurial/bundlerepo.py", line 305, in instance
    return bundlerepository(ui, repopath, bundlename)
  File "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6/mercurial/bundlerepo.py", line 177, in __init__
    raise util.Abort(_("%s: not a Mercurial bundle file") % bundlename)
Abort: /var/www/hgrepos/cgi-bin/hgweb.config: not a Mercurial bundle file

Following this, I set up my hgweb.wsgi-file like this:

#!/usr/bin/env python
#

# Uncomment and adjust if Mercurial is not installed system-wide:
#import sys; sys.path.insert(0, "/usr/lib/pymodules/python2.6")

# Uncomment to send python tracebacks to the browser if an error occurs:
import cgitb; cgitb.enable()

from mercurial import demandimport; demandimport.enable()
from mercurial.hgweb import hgweb, wsgicgi

# Path to repo or hgweb config to serve (see 'hg help hgweb')
config = "/var/www/hgrepos/cgi-bin/hgweb.config"
application = hgweb(config)

Restarting Apache

/etc/init.d/apache2 restart

and now everything works for me.

A big THANKS again to krtek who really helped out ending my pain! Made my day 😀