Directory overwritten after update

I have had this happen twice now and I am hoping that someone might be able to either help me understand why this is happening or disable automatic interworxs updates.

I have several domains on my server. Most have a standard directory structure but one of the domains is a zend application so I need to have the root directory be the public folder of my zend application. The default directory that siteworx setup when I created the account is /home/awnincco/awninc.com/html/cars. Since I can’t change that I made the “cars” directory a symbolic link to the public folder of my zend application. This works well until I get an automatic update and it overwrites my “cars” directory and puts the default interworx website files in there. Even if I try to recreate the symbolic link it still displays the default website files and the system doesn’t seem to follow the symbolic link. I had someone help me figure this out last time but I am not sure what they did to fix it and I am trying to figure this out so I don’t have to get support every time I get an update. Is there any way to prevent the cars symbolic link from being overwritten in an update?

I also remember the person that helped me fix this last time saying that the config files for apache were overwritten in the update, taking out all the custom directives that had been put in place for the zend application to function properly. So I was also hoping to find out if this is true and if so, can it be avoided in any way?

Any advice or help would be greatly appreciated :slight_smile:

Hi David,

The only thing an interworx provided httpd update would overwrite would be a few files in /var/www/html, and I assume it’s the /var/www/html/index.php file that is the source of the headaches.

It should be possible to setup your zend application to not reside at /var/www/html, which would prevent this problem from happening. The main web server config file /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf should not be overwritten by the update. We will be making sure the /var/www/html/index.php file does not get overwritten as well, but we won’t be able to make that change until the NEXT update, so it would still be a good idea to work around this problem.

Without investigating how the app was setup on your server, I can’t really make any suggestions, but if you were to open a support ticket with login information and details about the application and its location, we’d be happy to take a look.

Paul

Hi Paul,

Thank you for the quick reply. It’s funny because right after I posted the system started recognizing the symbolic link again and everything is good now.

When you are referring to the directory path /var/www/html, are you referring to the root path of any websites on the system or specifically just that directory? So if I have a website with two subdomains, siteworx creates a path for each one. So I have:

/home/username/website.com/html
/home/username/website.com/html/subdomain1
/home/username/website.com/html/subdomain2

Would an update do anything to these directories? My zend application actually doesn’t reside at /var/www/html or /home/username/website.com/html. It resides at /usr/share/application-name/public. In this example, /home/username/website.com/html/subdomain1 is what siteworx setup for me so to get to my application I made subdomain1 a symbolic link to /usr/share/application-name/public. The update is overwriting my symbolic link and switching it back to a folder and placing the default website files in it.

Sorry to be so lengthy here. I think I understand how to fix this next time it happens. I just wanted to make sure that you knew it wasn’t the /var/www/html directory I was having issues with but rather the siteworx created directories for the subdomain.

Thanks again!