Question

I am currently writing an admin page for my webserver, to make it easier on myself to create new apache domains from my browser. Everything is pretty much working as I want it to, except for one thing.

To elaborate: I have a cron job on my server running a bash script as root that checks a file containing a list of domain names that I want to be created. If the file contains a domain name, it automatically creates a new virtual host for this domain, edits my hosts file, and restarts the server. This all works perfectly, however what I would like for the script to do, is that it activates the domain that it automatically creates before it restarts the server. I tried doing this using apache 2’s a2ensite command, however the script returns an error saying the command is not found.

Is there a way to call this command from a bash script, or is there an alternative to this command that I can call?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

$ which a2ensite
/usr/sbin/a2ensite

Usually, cron has a quite restrictive $PATH, not including /usr/sbin or /sbin, which are system binaries (for use by root). It’s always a good idea to use fully qualified path names. So either call /usr/bin/a2ensite in your script, or define a variable:

A2ENSITE=/usr/sbin/a2ensite
...
${A2ENSITE} new-domain.com