Question

I have a client who wants to be able to add/delete/modify email addresses etc through cPanel, but I’d much rather add my own virtualhosts config for the actual site instead of a cPanel generated one. (A bunch of reasons. Don’t want to install cPanel’s ruby, would rather use passenger than mongrel, etc etc).

I don’t have a whole lot of experience with cPanel, but by the look of things it takes over httpd.conf & auto-generates a virtualhost for the site – and overwrites stuff if I try to make any changes to the virtualhost settings. Is there a simple means to overwrite these settings without removing the rest of the site’s functionality from cPanel?

Cheers…

Answer 1

You are correct in guessing that cPanel takes over a lot of things and auto-generates certain configs. To be honest, I have no idea what it does in regard to virtualhosts configs, but I do have recent experience in other areas which tends to confirm your suspicion:

So, to illustrate… cPanel comes stock with Rails 2.3.5. On the cPanel GemSet page, you can see Rails 3.0.6 shows as available, and even lets you install it via cPanel or SSH/BASH. This results in no error message at all (in fact, cPanel itself reports it as installed), but a rails --version command at SSH/BASH still shows version 2.3.5. After some research on on the cPanel forums, I discovered that this is because cPanel is hard coded for Mongrel support, and Mongrel doesn’t support Rails past version 2.3.8. According to one of their moderators, they’re looking at a possible Passenger solution, but it’s still in the early stages of coding and months away.

So, while I realize my example doesn’t specifically answer your question about virtualhosts, I think it confirms the validity of your suspicion that cPanel overrides certain settings, and may even be hard coded in ways that aren’t immediately transparent…