On Wednesday 10 November 2010, Stefan Fritsch wrote: > > The frequency with which this gets asked seems to make it > > worthwhile doing something, even if this patch isn't the right > > thing to do. > > Maybe the larger solution of having a document_root field in the > request_rec would be better. Has anyone had a chance to look at > Ondrej's patch, already? I didn't get around to doing it, yet. > > https://issues.apache.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=49705
I have looked at the patch and it looks reasonable. The fact that two known modules (mod_vhost_ldap and mod_ftp) copy the whole server_rec just to change the document root means that this feature is needed. Well, at least for mod_ftp it is... I am wondering if the people who want this for mod_vhost_* actually want something else, namely an easy way to get the root dir of a web application in php/cgi/whatever... What about this idea: Add two new cgi env variables: CONTEXT_ROOT and CONTEXT_ROOT_PATH (or APP_ROOT/APP_ROOT_PATH or ...). And add a new config directive ContextRoot /some/app/ For all requests below /some/app/, this would set CONTEXT_ROOT to /some/app/ and CONTEXT_ROOT_PATH to whatever dir this URL maps to in the file system (taking into account mod_userdir, mod_alias, etc.). This would make it easier for applications to find their files and to create self-referential URLs. In absense of a ContextRoot directive, the variables would be set to the current alias root-uri and dir, or to the document root and "/". Mod_userdir could set them to the /~user/ and /home/user/public_html. There could even be some logic in mod_proxy that passes the correct URI to the backend server, so that the CONTEXT_ROOT variable would actually represent the URI as seen by the client. Is this a good idea? Would this solve real-world problems?
