[NBLUG/talk] FHS and webapps

[Kyle Rankin]

On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 07:31:18PM -0800, Kendall Shaw wrote:
> The filesystem hierarchy standard seems to say that files for a
> website should be placed in /srv. Serving images for PXE from /srv
> seems to make sense to me.
> But... HTTP serves resources which are not files any more than an
> executable is a file. And there isn't only one network program on a
> computer serving HTTP, usually.

It's UNIX, everything is a file! That said, older installs used to put PXE
files under /tftpboot, but these days Debian-based distributions at least
tend to favor /var/lib/tftpboot. More below...

> 
> So, of course, you can put webapps whereever you want. But, for the
> sake of knowing where a distribution or a vendor should not put
> files, where do you think a locally developed webapp's component
> files should be located?
> 
> I think it would not be these places:
> 
> The dump:
> /usr/local
> 
> Distro files:
> /usr
> 
> Vendor files:
> /opt
> 
> Files for file transfer protocols:
> /srv
> 
> Transient files:
> /var
> 
> Kendall
> 
> -- 
> Dead peer detection detects dead peer.
> 

First, I'm just happy to see people are still trying to make careful
consideration about the right place to put files, too many sysadmin and
developers these days have no idea what the FHS is, why the existing
directories are there and end up throwing things in a home directory or
worse, creating their own special root-level directory.

What I try to do, in general, when making decisions like this, specifically
with Debian-based distributions like Debian and Ubuntu, is to pick an
existing common package that achieves something similar and see what they
do. Debian folks, particularly for widely-used packages, tend to be fairly
picky about where files get installed so there's a good chance they will
pick a good location. But even more important, to me, is consistency. Even
though I'm personally not a fan of /opt, if my organization standardized on
it that's what I'd use. I'd rather things be wrong, but consistent, than
inconsistently right.

More to your question, it really depends when you are talking about web
files if you are talking about executables (like .php or ruby or java
files) or if you are talking about static files like images, user uploads,
etc. The beauty of modern package management is that you don't have to dump
everything into a single directory. For instance, if you look at the Debian
wordpress install, all of the .php files are dumped under
/usr/share/wordpress because they are treated like executables but the
Debian convention is to put web server docroots under /var/www. Based on
that, if I were on a Debian system I would put my custom executable web app
files under /usr/local/share/appname but I might put the main docroot under
/var/www/ particularly if I'm going to accept user uploads as you don't
want /usr to grow rapidly.

Basically, pick a well-known package in your distribution that achieves a
similar goal and see where it puts files, and then mimic it with the only
change of putting anything in /usr under /usr/local instead.

-- 
Kyle Rankin
The North Bay Linux Users' Group
http://nblug.org
IRC: greenfly at irc.freenode.net #nblug 
kyle at nblug.org