Server 10.8 User Websites 404 - where did ~user/Sites go?

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Level 1

7 points

Server 10.8 User Websites 404 - where did ~user/Sites go?

Well, I've spent the past 12 hours on this problem...

Replaced our companies outside-user 9-year old Xserve with a Mac Pro Server.

As many have posted, web services to my.company.ext:/~username/ no longer works - Apache has to be directed somehow to look in a users Sites folder.

I've tried the UserDir Sites option in the httpd.conf - and a lot of other desperate attempts, without sucess. Not many posts on Mountain Lion (10.8) - suggestions for 10.7 don't seem to apply. Apache doesn't even load its pages from the default directories anymore (/Library/WebServer/Documents)... I found I had to modify the index.html.en file in the directory /Library/Server/Web/Data/Sites/Default/, in order to just get a web page up to inform extremely irritated users that we are working on it.

How do I enable the web pages for individual user websites?

Looks like this is the last OS X server we will evey buy... this has been a nightmare.

Posted on Feb 19, 2013 1:13 AM

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Answer 1

Feb 19, 2013 4:58 AM in response to davebwr

did you google this?

http://krypted.com/mac-os-x/setting-up-and-using-web-services-in-os-x-mountain-l ion-server/

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Answer 2

davebwr Author

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7 points

Feb 19, 2013 8:26 AM in response to Ted Petrosky

Thanks for the tip: helps explain some things, but I'm still unable to get it to work... perhaps I am not clear on how to use the re-directs. In the redirects Server Admin option I entered: http://my.company.ext/~username/ to be redirected to: http://my.company.ext/Users/username/Sites

It looks like it should work. I'll keep trying options.

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Answer 3

Feb 19, 2013 8:29 AM in response to davebwr

and your DNS resolves (both forward and reverse) to do what you want. if you ping the address, does the correct IP come back at you?

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Answer 4

davebwr Author

Level 1

7 points

Feb 19, 2013 8:38 AM in response to Ted Petrosky

We have our co-location provider manage all DNS services. When I do a ping to our server (ping my.company.ext) it returns with the correct IP (the fact I can get to the servers default page would seem to indicate this). I'm guessing I'm not entering the redirect information correctly. e.g.,

redirect /~ to ???

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Answer 5

davebwr Author

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7 points

Feb 19, 2013 8:46 AM in response to davebwr

I'm thinking I should be editing the alias instead of the redirect: but issue of the format of from/to is unclear

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Answer 6

davebwr Author

Level 1

7 points

Feb 19, 2013 9:36 AM in response to davebwr

Figured it out...

First, I moved the /Users/user/Sites folder to /Users/user/Public/Sites, and gave it w+rx privs,

then in Server admin -> Aliases, I added two entrites:

/user to /Users/user/Public/Sites

and

/~user to /Users/user/Public/Sites

and, of course stop/start web services

Thanks for the tip Ted

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Answer 7

Feb 19, 2013 10:32 AM in response to davebwr

google is your friend

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Answer 8

thubsch

Level 1

17 points

Jul 10, 2015 8:01 PM in response to davebwr

Hi,

I ran into the same problem updating the Server.app on a Mac mini still running Mavericks. After reading this exchange, I found that it was not necessary to move or copy the /User/username/Sites folder anywhere. Setting up the alias "/~username" --> "/Users/username/Sites" worked just fine. The only trouble is that---as written here---one such alias must be entered for every single user.

The Mavericks Server.app also allows setting up a Grep-patern alias, which should be possible to set up so that entering "/~namestring" attempts to serve the contents of the folder "/Users/namestring/Sites", where "namestring" is anything that a client enters in their browser. The Grep-patern for "namestring" of course should be set up so that a nefarious client could not possibly enter a string that ends up being executed while parsing and cause havoc... which is something I am not sure how to do.

Cheers, Tristan

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