I have a dedicated CentOS server. I manage all my users, apps, and virtual hosts manually. I’m using Apache 2.2.3 and Passenger 3.0.7 to serve my apps. I have a typical httpd.conf file in /etc/httpd/conf/ that includes all *.conf files in my /etc/httpd/conf/vhosts/ directory. Normally for each app I create a new sample-domain.com.conf file in the vhosts directory.
However, I have a particular app that needs frequent apache configuration changes, and I’d like it to be more a part of my app and its version control. So I’ve moved my apache configuration file into the apps config directory. I added a script to my Capistrano deploy.rb that sets the permissions on the apache conf file in the app to 755. I added an include line in my vhosts that includes the symlinked current version of the apache conf file from the app.
Which brings me to my simple question: is this safe or a bad idea?
For frequent config changes in Apache, consider using a .htaccess file instead. Changing .conf files requires bouncing/hupping the server, and if a .conf file has an error, that’ll kill the whole server and take down all sites. A .htaccess error will take down just the one site/directory where the file is.