Question

I have multiple websites on a dedicated server running under Linux/Apache. The sites need to access common data from a directory named ‘DATA’ under the doc root. I cannot replicate this directory for every site. I would like to put this under a common directory (say /DATA) and provide a symbolic link to this directory from the doc root for each of the sites.

www/DATA -> /DATA

1. Is there a better way of doing this?

2. If I put this common directory (/DATA) directly under Linux root directory, can there be problems from Linux standpoint as the directory size can be several gigabytes and the sub directories under /DATA will need have write permissions.

Thanks

Answer 1

Use Alias along with the Directory directive. This will allow the site to access the directory via a url path.

I’m not sure what exactly it means that you’ll have scripts accessing the directory to provide data. Executing shell scripts to read an produce data is a different story entirely, but you probably want to avoid this if this is what you’re doing. Application pages could be included in the data directory and use a relative path to get to the data. Then all sites get the same scripts and data.

I don’t know what your data is, but I’d probably opt to put it in a database. Think about how you have to update multiple machines if you have to scale your app. Maybe the data you have is simple and a DB is overkill.