As we already announced, me @giacomo and @Stll0 directed our efforts on Shared Folders and this new page, Virtual hosts, trying to follow the advice of our community.
The nethserver-virtualhosts package is now available and we hope youâll test it and give us your feedback on this work!
To install it just go to Software center and select the âWeb serverâ group. Or type
yum install nethserver-virtualhosts
As you can see from the screenshots Virtual hosts are a new kind of object that allows
FTP access to the vhost web root. Folders permissions can be set from FTP.
SSL/TLS certificate selection. @alefattorini will tell us how to configure them in an upcoming announcement - stay tuned!
and other tweaks!
The UI module has a plugin architecture, so additional features can be added by other packages.
You may notice some things we talked about are not present, like:
.htaccess interface: AllowOverrides ALL is enabled by default. We think .htaccess file(s) can be uploaded with FTP. Many applications and howtos provide good defaults. Anyway a plugin can be developed.
proxypass: weâd release a separate page. It seems a different use case
FTP and SSL: we agree itâs safer, but itâs more complex to configure. The FTP daemon does not use system users (and passwords). Ad-hoc credentials are created: we hope this will mitigate the security concerns.
customizable webroot path: does not fit well with FTP chroot configuration.
My first thought was âhow can this integrate with cms packages?â
For instance, I have an NS instance serving web pages, basic html, from what I see, this lets me manage several different web sites, but, who, other than me, literally hand codes basic html sites anymore, wordpress, joomla, etc, is the way to go.
Is this something to consider, would it be worth considering an official cms package or two for NS?
We have ownCloud, why not Wordpress⌠?
I think that phpMyAdmin itâs the de-facto standard tool to manage the sql database.
Some documentation could probably solve the problem of creating a database for an application.
I agree itâs good for manage, but I was thinking about creating a DB and initializing an administrative account for it, like we do for FTP.
phpMyAdmin itself allows authentication based on DB accounts. Like FTP, Iâd prefer DB accounts on system accounts.
Once the plugin creates the administrative account itâs safe to use it from phpMyAdmin, to generate a restricted DB account or use the administrative account itself to configure a web application⌠what do you think?
So do we have a priority list for new features? Iâm seeing S/FTP, and DB features/additions. What about the ProxyPass interface? Is that on the list any where?
Also keep in mind, that not everything is always running on Nethserver or Linux.
For me I primary use Nethserver as a Firewall and configured the Nethserver as a virtual host to forward the different subdomains to different servers based on Windows and Linux.
So for me this is what needs to be managed.
The advanced topic on this is to (auto-)configure SSL-Certificates. You should be able to use your own certificates or click on a button that is named âUse Letâs Encryptâ and donât take care about certificates anymore because Nethserver is managing this.
BTW: There is also another service like Letâs Encrypt: Start Encrypt. Maybe Letâs encrypt should not be the only focus (but it would be OK for me if it is). https://www.startssl.com/StartEncrypt
I can draw a picture how I like the interface to be, but I only know exactly the use-case I wrote above so I think I will miss all other cases when I do this.
I think this is an use case for the âProxy Passâ page. As said, itâd be distinct from Virtual hosts. Moreover , I think Proxy Pass should integrate with Docker too.
Think about a network firewall: it does not serve web sites directly nor has FTP service to upload contents, it is configured to act as reverse proxy only.
The only place where ProxyPass and VirtualHosts overlap is the virtual host name. A validator could check if a ServerName is already used by another object.
Iâd like to hear about other products! Did anyone experiment them?
