Apache Cookbook, 2nd Edition

5.3. Giving Users Their Own URLs

Problem

You want to give each user on your system his own Web space.

Solution

If you want users’ Web locations to be under their home directories, add this to your httpd.conf file:

UserDir public_html

To put all users’ Web directories under a central location:

UserDir "/www/users/*/htdocs"

If you want to let users access their home directory without having to use a tilde (~) in the URL, you can use mod_rewrite to perform this mapping:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond "/home/$1/public_html" -d [NC]
RewriteRule "^/([^/]+)/(.*)" "/home/$1/public_html/$2"

Finally, if you have mod_perl installed, you can do something more advanced like this (again, added to your httpd.conf file):

<Perl>
# Folks you don't want to have this privilege
my %forbid = map { $_ => 1 } qw(root postgres bob);
opendir H, '/home/';
my @dir = readdir(H);
closedir H;
foreach my $u (@dir) {
    next if $u =~ m/^\./;
    next if $forbid{$u};
    if (-e "/home/$u/public_html") {
        push @Alias, "/$u/", "/home/$u/public_html/";
    }
}
</Perl>

Discussion

The first solution is the simplest and most widely used of the possible recipes we present here. With this directive in place, all users on your system are able to create a directory called public_html in their home directories and put Web content there. Their Web space is accessible via a URL starting with a tilde (~), followed by their usernames. So, a user named bacchus accesses his personal Web space via the URL:

http://www.example.com/~bacchus/

If you installed Apache ...