Re: Allow relative paths in Directory directives?

[Erik Thuning <thuning@xxxxxxxxx>]

    Hi!
    
    Thank you for your reply. There are absolutely more or less awful
    solutions that work around this issue, my preferred one being to
    abuse the <Location> directive, but I have the feeling that
    this is a fairly common thing that people want to do - block access
    to this subdirectory, exempt this directory from authentication,
    etc. Having the option of specifying such directories relative to
    the document root seems like a useful feature to me. 
    
    Shipping a largely functional example vhost file for a web
    application springs to mind as a good use case - simply instruct the
    user to modify the DocumentRoot and otherwise leave the file alone.
    
    To be clear, I don't have an unresolved configuration problem that I
    want to solve. Rather I'm considering requesting a new feature that
    seems like it would be useful, and would like to know if there are
    any reasons that it would be a Bad Idea.
    
    /T

On 2020-09-11 12:23, Gillis J. de Nijs wrote:

Hi Erik,

Couldn't you do something like this?

<Directory "/www/*/public_html">

That should work just fine, if you have your vhosts in a common structure.  Alternatively, you could look at DirectoryMatch and come up with something awful that matches your structure.

https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/core.html#directory

https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/core.html#directorymatch

Cheers,

Gillis

On Fri, Sep 11, 2020 at 11:30 AM Erik Thuning <thuning@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Hi!

This is something that I keep thinking about when I configure my various
vhosts, and would like feedback on, along with a pointer to where I
could request the change if it is actually sane.

Currently, <Directory> directives require an absolute path. I would like
to be able to use paths relative to the DocumentRoot by omitting the
initial / in the path supplied in standard UNIX fashion (basically
treating the DocumentRoot as the working directory). If the <Directory>
is specified in a context without a set DocumentRoot, it would be
considered an error.

To me this would solve a long-standing issue with feeling compelled by
my own laziness to use <Location> directives when I want to customize
handling of directories inside the DocumentRoot. This is counter to the
recommendations in the documentation but prepending the DocumentRoot
path everywhere is both cumbersome and error-prone, so I usually go for
the "bad" approach.

Adding support for relative <Directory> directives could also make
certain configurations more portable by only needing to change the
DocumentRoot when cloning a vhost to a new directory, instead of having
to update all instances of <Directory> as well.

I haven't been able to find any explicit rationale for the way the
directive works right now, so I don't know if I'm missing anything
fundamental that would make this unworkable. I would be thankful for any
feedback pointing me to such a rationale if it exists.

Regards
Erik Thuning

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