Running Weblogs with Slash

Slash Directory Structures

The first glimpse of Slash’s odd bundle of files and directories may evoke memories of using Unix for the first time. Navigating the interconnections to find one specific file is difficult without some sort of roadmap. Take heart. For the most part, there’s an underlying organization behind the apparent chaos. Understanding how everything fits together is very important to advanced customization.

The Slash Home Directory

The Slash home directory (/usr/local/slash, by default) holds several files and directories. A typical directory listing could be:

[slash@firewheel /usr/local/slash]$ ls -lp
total 9
drwxr-xr-x    2 slash    slash        1024 Aug 22 16:22 bin/
drwxr-xr-x    2 slash    slash        1024 Aug 22 16:43 httpd/
drwxr-xr-x   11 slash    slash        1024 Aug 22 16:23 plugins/
drwxr-xr-x    2 slash    slash        1024 Aug 22 16:45 sbin/
drwxr-xr-x    3 slash    slash        1024 Aug 22 16:27 site/
-rw-r--r--    1 slash    slash          22 Aug 22 16:27 slash.sites
-rw-r--r--    1 slash    slash           6 Aug 22 16:44 slashd.slash.pid
drwxr-xr-x    5 slash    slash        1024 Aug 22 16:22 sql/
drwxr-xr-x    3 slash    slash        1024 Aug 22 16:23 themes/

This directory holds data and utilities for all of the Slash sites installed on the server. For example, files in the bin/ directory are standard administrative tools. They can be used on any installed site, given a proper DBIx::Password virtual user. (This will be covered later.)

Perhaps the most important file in this directory is slash.sites. This is a very simple configuration file, used to install ...